Black Genealogy

Presents the obstacles and advantages of searching for Black family history, including information about places to research, and documents and techniques used to uncover genealogical history, even though considered lost or incomplete.

In 1907, the Indian Territory became the State of Oklahoma. To qualify for the payments and land allotments set aside for the Five Civilized Tribes, the former slaves of these nations had to apply for official enrollment, thus producing testimonies of imm

"I teach the kings of their ancestors so that the lives of the ancients might serve them as an example, for the world is old but the future springs from the past." Mamadou Kouyate "Sundiata", An Epic of Old Mali, a.d. 1217-1257 Two major questions of the ages are: Who am I? and Where am I going? From the moment the first African slaves were dragged onto these shores, these questions have become increasingly harder for African-Americans to answer. To find the answers, you first must discover where you have been, you must go back to your family tree--but you must dig through rocky layers of lost information, of slavery--to find your roots. During the Great Migration in the 1940s, when African-Americans fled the strangling hands of Jim Crow for the relative freedoms of the North, many tossed away or buried the painful memories of their past. As we approach the new millennium, African-Americans are reaching back to uncover where we have been, to help us determine where we are going. Finding a Place Called Homeis a comprehensive guide to finding your African-American roots and tracing your family tree. Written in a clear, conversational, and accessible style, this book shows you, step-by-step, how to find out who your family was and where they came from. Beginning with your immediate family, Dr. Dee Parmer Woodtor gives you all the necessary tools to dig up your past: how to interview family members; how to research your past using census reports, slave schedules, property deeds, and courthouse records; and how to find these records. Using the Internet for genealogical research is also discussed in this timely and necessary book. Finding a Place Called Home helps you find your family tree, and helps place it in the context of the garden of African-American people. As you learn how to find your own history, you learn the history of all Africans in the Americas, including the Caribbean, and how to benefit from a new understanding of your family's history, and your people's. Finding a Place Called Home also discusses the growing family reunion movement and other ways to clebrate newly discovered family history. Tomorrow will always lie ahead of us if we don't forget yesterday. Finding a Place Called Home shows how to retrieve yesterday to free you for all of your tomorrows. Finding a Place Called Home: An African-American Guide to Genealogy and Historical Identitytakes us back, step-by-step, including: Methods of searching and interpreting records, such as marriage, birth, and death certificates, census reports, slave schedules, church records, and Freedmen's Bureau information. Interviewing and taking inventory of family members Using the Internet for genealogical purposes Information on tracing Caribbean ancestry

Over the past two decades, in workshops and personal consultations, thousands of persons have have received the expertise and knowledge of author Frazine Taylor about Alabama genealogical research. In addition, she has taught the art to hundreds of students. As Dr. James Rose notes, all genealogists looking for the family tree in Alabama sooner or later come across Frazine. And now they have her book, Researching African American Genealogy in Alabama: A Resource Guide. In the book, she provides the information and guidance to help locate the resources available for researching African American records in archives, libraries, and county courthouses throughout the state. The idea for this guidebook rose out of her lecturing throughout the country and having noticed that reference guides on African American family history resources seemed to exist for every state except Alabama. This was regrettable not merely for researchers on African American history in Alabama. In fact, Alabama’s records play an especially important role in U.S. family history research because of the migration patterns of Alabama’s freedmen, first to urban areas of Alabama and then to northern cities, a trend that continued throughout the first part of the twentieth century.

Gale has launched another new project--Genealogical Sourcebook series--and the first volumes look promising. The remaining volumes on Asian Americans and Native Americans will be published this summer. Libraries can order all four volumes for $239 (0-8103-8541-4). Part 1 of each volume consists of informative essays on immigration and migration, basic genealogical methods and resources, and problems specific to ethnic genealogy--such as naming practices, the reuse of graves where families could not afford perpetual sites, and reasons for deliberate falsification of records. Explanations and tips on accessing records specific to these groups, such as those of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Inquisition, records of religious orders, and an overview of newspaper ads and Hispanic heraldry are instructive and pragmatic. Tables, examples, and an extensive bibliography are included. Part 2, 'Directory of Genealogical Information, ' lists libraries and archives, public and private organizations, print resources, and other media that 'hold materials relevant to genealogists whether their focus is on genealogy in general or on a specific ethnic group.' Libraries and archives are listed geographically; those outside the U.S. are in Canada for African Americans, and in Guatemala, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, Cuba, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Canada for Hispanic Americans. There are surprisingly few listings for Florida, which has a substantial Hispanic population. Private and public organizations include commercial ventures (publishers, researchers for a fee, bookstores) and nonprofits (genealogical societies, the American Antiquarian Society, etc.). The section entitled 'Print Resources' lists many sources from the 1980s, but there are also current publications. The author and title-organization indexes access only the products and sources listed in part 2. The subject index accesses the essays in part 1. Libraries that hold books such as George R. Ryskamp's Tracing Your Hispanic Heritage (1984) will want to keep them for their scholarly thoroughness. They will want to add these new books for their relative currency and for their simpler explanations of complicated facets of black and Hispanic culture.--BL 05/15/1995.

2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018 A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together. Illustrations by Stephen Crotts

Although the search for African American ancestry prior to the Civil War is challenging, the difficulties are not always insurmountable. Finding Your African American Ancestors takes you through your ancestors' transition from slavery to freedom, and helps you find them using the federal census, plantation records, and other helpful sources. The book also considers ways to locate runaway slave advertisements, to identify an ancestor's military regiment, and to access the valuable information from The Freedman's Savings and Trust records.

Includes background information on African American history and culture and offers suggestions for tracing the genealogy of persons of African descent back to the ancestors' arrival in America. An annotated list of resources is presented for each chapter.

Designed with both the novice and the professional researcher in mind, this text provides reference resources and introduces a methodology specific to investigating African-American genealogy. In the second edition, information has been reorganized by state. Within each state are listings for resources such as state archives, census records, military records, newspapers, and manuscript collections.