A Students Guide To African American Genealogy

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.

"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

Tracing one's African-American ancestry can be uniquely challenging. This guide helps overcome the obstacles and pitfalls of specialized research by offering a proven, three-part approach.

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.

Complete with step-by-step instructions on how to conduct the search, gather findings, and publish a finished document, this indispensable guide serves the vast numbers of African-Americans interested in tracing their family histories. It provides readers with the tools to begin their quest and overcome barriers unique to African-American genealogical search. 25 photos & family tree chart.

Portable and easy-to-read, the first volume of the African American Researcher's Guide to Online Genealogical Sources, can go with you anywhere. It can fit in your purse, in your desk or in your research bag. Or...just add it to your reference library. Well-crafted and concise, this volume is a must-read for any beginning African American Genealogist. A dynamic resource, it is indisputably the best book for African Americans looking to pursue online genealogical research. The African American Researcher's Guide to Online Genealogical Sources outlines essential steps and pinpoints available internet resources. Inside there are links to free and subscription databases, research projects, university studies, transcriptions, compendium genealogies, scanned images, online digital archives, state and local archives, instructional materials, podcasts, wikis, search portals, online directories, historical societies, message boards, mailing lists and hobby groups. If you want to search for your family’s genealogy, but don’t know where to start this is the book for you.

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.

Trace, document, record, and write your family's history with this easy-to-read, step-by-step authoritative guide. Finally, here is the fun, easy-to-use guide that African Americans have been waiting for since Alex Haley published Roots more than twenty-five years ago. Written by the leading African American professional genealogist in the United States who teaches and lectures widely, Black Roots highlights some of the special problems, solutions, and sources unique to African Americans. Based on solid genealogical principles and designed for those who have little or no experience researching their family's past, but valuable to any genealogist, this book explains everything you need to get started, including: where to search close to home, where to write for records, how to make the best use of libraries and the Internet, and how to organize research, analyze historical documents, and write the family history. This guide also includes: -real case histories that illustrate the unique challenges posed to African Americans and how they were solved -more than 100 illustrations and photographs of actual documents and records you're likely to encounter when tracing your family tree -samples of all the worksheets and forms you'll need to keep your research in order -a list of the traps even experienced researchers often fall into that hamper their research And more.