African Roots Podcast Episode #323 June 12, 2015

 

Well hello everyone, I am coming to you today from Birmingham, Alabama on the lovely Samford University  campus to attend the Institute for Genealogy and Historical Research. And last week I was in Burbank California where I attended and presented at the SCGS Genealogy Jamboree California. I had the honor to speak at both events. Here in Alabama I have taught in the Five Civilized Tribes track and it has been an wonderful experience.

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I am looking forward for attending some workshops at the Juneteenth event in Prince George’s County MD. As you know Juneteenth, many places throughout the country are celebrating the 150th Anniversary of Freedom. Were your ancestors freedom fighters, were they self-emancipators and make it to a contraband camp? And you may or may not know if they were. But this is a good time then, to use the new Freedmen’s Bureau mapping site. Mapping the Freedmen’s Bureau contains a good number of maps that go beyond the bureau field offices. They also include the Contraband camps. Take a look and see if your ancestors lived in one? That might reveal how freedom came to your family. This site was developed by Toni Carrier of LowCountry Africana, and myself. She is the real technical guru who was able to provide the technical structure to the map.  But I hope that you will do something next week to honor the ancestors.

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Speaking of the Freedmen’s Bureau, I want to direct your attention to a site, “Discover Freedom”. Well next week in celebration of Juneteenth, there is a special initiative that will be announced, to index the Freedmen’s Bureau. The bureau officially known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. Next week coming from Los Angeles, will be a live video cast that will be live streamed from an event launching of the indexing project. The Freedmen’s Bureau Indexing project will begin with a call to action to get the records from the Field Offices of the Bureau, indexed. This is a wonderful record set and the more people involved, will make this record set available earlier, for researchers.

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Last nights episode on Bernice Bennett’s show, featured Dr. Allyson Hobbs who had written an interesting study of the occurrence of racial passing.  This was a good discussion about the effects that passing has on the family and the person who also passed.

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Some webinars coming up. Melvin Collier will be speaking online in a Family Tree Webinar in July. He is a very focused speaker, and truly professional. Speaking of professionals, if you have thought about entering the genealogy arena as a professional, then institutes and classes will sharpen those skills. Also note that OBA is sponsoring a special Juneteenth webinar as well, next week. Webinars provide great opportunities to learn and sharpen skills and so do institutes. In fact note that there is still time to register for MAAGI and this is a great time to learn some new skills.

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Have you been paying attention to all of the activity on social media? There are dozens of African American genealogy groups online! AfriGeneas has two places on FB–one is a community group and the other is a fan page. But the community group has over 8000 members and that is incredible. And then there is OBA, Our Black Ancestors a huge group created by Sharon Morgan. There is an African American DNA group with more than 10,000 members. So take a look at what those who are professionals are doing. They are writing, teaching and posting on social media and so much more.
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The is a great newspaper site from Louisiana online. This is a site with African American newspapers. Well there are about 25 new titles added to that site and I think you will find it fascinating.

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Well, I am winding things down as I am traveling later this afternoon, and am anxious to get back home and unwind from an amazing series of events.  Thank you for tuning in and listening again this week, and thanks for sharing your posts and bringing them to my attention.

In the meantime, keep researching, keep documenting, and keep sharing what you find.