I'm always looking for early postcards of Starkville and don't you know I came across this charming book.
If you live in/near Fort Wayne, Salt Lake City, or Washington, D.C., copies of this book will soon be available for viewing at the Allen County Public Library, Family History Library, and the Library of Congress.
Black and white copies are still available. Send me an e-mail and I'll be sure to forward your query to Ruth Morgan.
Those of us who attended the International Black Genealogy Summit are still talking about the wonderful speakers we heard. From the East Coast, to the West Coast, and all points in between, more than 400 of us were there to represent, network, and put on our thinking caps.
This year, October 20, 21, and 22, Fort Wayne will host the National Black Genealogy Summit. Roberta Ridley, of the Allen County Public Library, and I promised ourselves that when we found our common Ridley ancestor that we would do a part two presentation of Deborah Abbott's and Char McCargo Bah's He Owned Our People: One Plantation, Two Families, Two States...
My grandmother's great grandfather, James Ridley, was born in North Carolina -- just as Roberta's Ridley family had been. While her family eventually went to Indiana, mine remained in Mississippi. I have no doubt that 2011 will be the year that we will break through that brick-wall.
Forget about the cold, February is my favorite month. I so look forward to see black history programming on my local PBS stations in Chicago: WTTW (aka Window To The World), WYCC (City Colleges of Chicago Public Television), & WYIN (Lakeshore Public Television).
Tuesday, I watched When I Rise, a documentary about Barbara Smith Conrad. "I am from east Texas: Center Point community...Rolling hills, red clay dirt, honeysuckle everywhere...this community was founded by five freedmen. One of them was my great grandfather...We sang all the time..."
Ms. Smith Conrad, with a voice to-die-for, was one of the first black students admitted to University of Texas at Austin. During an era of Jim Crow, she was dropped from a student opera, Dido and Aeneas. Life-changing events will take her across the globe, several times over, on an incredible odyssey.
Every now and then, when I'm at my local bookstore, I comb the magazine racks for genealogy magazines. Sometimes, I luck out and the current edition is still available.
And then, there are other times, when I'm not so lucky and the my bookstore has already soldout of that issue. This year, I'm going to start the year off right with year's subscription to my favorite magazine.
In addition, there are lots of "Family Tree Magazine" how-to videos at YouTube.com (20 at last count). One of them, Organize Your Hard Drive, grabbed my attention for obvious reasons!
I liked the idea of folders but I organized by research first by family surnames and then by category. For me, it made writing my family stories easier. No matter which method you choose, the goal remains the same: organizing your research.
If you still haven't read Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, this interview will tempt you otherwise. Spoiler Alert: The interview with Isabel Wilkerson immediately follows the minute forty-six second donation solicitation.
The Great Migration involved three streams: the East Coast, the Midwest, and the West Coast. In fifteen years, Wilkerson interviewed more than 1200 persons for this tome. Many friends have talked about this book but it wasn't until I saw her at BookTV.org, that I too wanted to know more about the migration.
With Mississippi roots, once removed, I focused on Ida Mae (Brandon) Gladney, who migrated from Chickasaw County, MS to Chicago in 1930s. By contrast, George Starling of Lake County, FL migrated to Harlem in the 1940s and Robert Foster, of Monroe, Ouachita Parish, LA migrated to Los Angeles in the 1950s.
Want to know more? Be sure to watch Part II of Amy Goodman's interview here.
Even though I'm still in the honeymoon phase of my new job, it promises to be everything that I hoped for. With a feeling of gratitude, I'm absolutely inspired to make 2011 a year to remember. With a combination of short-term and long-term goals, all things are possible.
I can't believe that I'm even considering genealogy resolutions but here goes:
The Golden Rule of Genealogy says that: "There is no truth without proof." While oral history is important, documenting your family history is even more important. Don't just take someone's word that an event happened, try to substantiate their claim with a paper trail. Recently, I've been spending a lot of time perusing old newspapers.
In fact, some of the articles have left me speechless. Don't believe me? Check out my first entry under Starkville: Believe it or Not!
Rosalind M., of AAGHSC's Mississippi Study Group, had reviewed Isabel Wilkerson's book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, for the group at the November meeting. This morning, at BookTV.org, I saw Isabel Wilkerson's name at the bottom of my TV screen.
Wilkerson and Michele Norris, former ABC news correspondent and author of The Grace of Silence, were discussing their new books at the 2010 Texas Book Festival. Soon, their respective back stories came to a close and Norris mentioned National Day of Listening, the day after Thanksgiving. A well known journalist, Norris teared up as she spoke of her father.
With regret, she told the audience, "...my children will never hear my father's voice because I never recorded it." As we spend time with family over the holiday weekend, remember NDL, a day to spend time with family members and video/tape record family stories for the future generations. Click here for an Instructional Guide.
Slavery By Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas Blackmon, is expected to air on PBS in 2012.
NB: For more information, visit the website of Doug Blackmon.
"...And, face it, the twenty-ten elections are so last Tuesday."
Candy Crowley, Host of State of the Union
As President Obama admitted, "...I'm not recommending that every future president take a shellacking like I did last night." Why should I even care about last Tuesday elections? Today, while watching American History at C-Span 3, I was reminded of the U.S. Presidential Election of 150 years ago, yesterday.
Consider the Tea Party fringe movement within the Republican Party. Generally speaking, third-party candidates benefit the incumbent party. And what happens when there are four presidential parties as was the case in 1860?
Stephen A. Douglas
Northern Democrats won 29% of the Popular vote
John C. Breckinridge
Southern Democrats won 18% of the Popular vote
John Bell
Constitution Unionists won 13% of the Popular vote
Abraham Lincoln
Republicans won 40% of the Popular vote
As you see the Democratic ticket (today's Republicans) was divided. Will history repeat itself in 2012? Time will tell. Question? Comment? Email me!
"If we are to go forward, we must first go back..."
M.L. King, Jr.
With Election Day 2010 behind us and in light of the Republicans pending takeover of the House of Representatives, it's only fitting that we look back at another time and another place.
With the passage of the 15th Amendment (1870), black men were allowed to vote -- albeit briefly. During Reconstruction (1865-1877), today's Democrats were yesteryear's Republicans, the Party of Lincoln.
Other than perjorative references found in in F.Z. Browne's Reconstruction in Oktibbeha County (1913) andThomas Battle Carroll's Historical Sketches of Oktibbeha (1931), not much is known about the following Oktibbeha County Congressmen.
Anderson Boyd
Benjamin Chiles
David Higgins
Randall Nettles
Question? Comment? Email me!
Source: Freedom's Lawmakers (1993) by Eric Foner
At a Saturday genealogy meeting, a new member of the group asked us if we had heard of Find-A-Grave.com. We all nodded our heads; some of us had even downloaded pictures from the site. I was surprised to find out that I was the only one in the group who had also uploaded pictures there.
Just last week, I had resurveyed our family cemetery. In 2006, I had even donated information gleaned from headstones and even uploaded a couple of pictures from the cemetery to Find-A-Grave.com. In my research, I also found several surnames unfamiliar to me. Not exactly sure what I would do with them, I filed away their names for future reference.
Why was I holding on to information that family members knew nothing about? With a fresh eye, I looked over Find-A-Grave.com. In addtion to donating interment information, I could also sign up as a volunteer for my local community? I entered my zipcode and saw that there were three open projects close to home.
I could do that, I told myself; but, first, I'm going to forward the family cemetery interments over to Find-A-Grave.com!
For the better part of year, I've been hearing about RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds. My response, typical of most people browsing the Internet, was "Why do I need that?"
I just couldn't wrap my head around the idea. I can just save the URL to my Favorites, right? Why do I need to subscribe to an RSS feed? Click here and the answer will soon be obvious.
Take your research to the next level. Subscribe to The Sand Creek Sentinel for more genealogy tips.
Today marks the 148th anniversary of the single bloodiest day of the Civil War at the Battle of Antietam. If you can answer the following four questions correctly, I’ll give you a pass on the above video.
• Delaware, Kansas, Maryland, & Missouri remained a part of the Union and were exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation? True or False?
• Antietam is to the Union as __________ is to the Confederacy.
• What action did President Lincoln take after the Union victory, at Antietam, in September 1862?
• Who was Abraham Lincoln’s presidential opponent of 1864?
Bonus
• According to President Lincoln, which Union general had a case of "the Slows"?
NB: Yale Professor David Blight is the Director of the Gilder Lehrman Institute and the author of A Slave No More. You might think that discovering two previously unpublished slave narratives in the 21st century is remarkable and it is. As family researchers however, even more remarkable is the research done to validate the events recorded for posterity by Wallace Turnage & John Washington.
