Slave Ancestral Research

Slave Ancestral Research
Author: Mary L. Jackson Fears
Publisher:
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780788402005

Describes methods of research and records found while researching the family of Luverser/Louisa McCrary, the author's seventh generation slave ancestor. Luverser McCrary was born ca. 1780 in Baldwin County, Georgia. Her daughter, Matilda, was born ca. 1825 in Baldwin County, Georgia. Matilda's husband, Simon McCants, was born ca. 1815 in Virginia and taken to Georgia as a slave. Matilda and Simon were married in 1866, as soon as they could legally marry. The surnames McCrary and McCants were adopted from the family names of slave owners.

Mississippi to Africa

Mississippi to Africa
Author: Melvin J. Collier
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012-05-24
Genre: Africa, West
ISBN: 9781477486016

Mississippi to Africa captures Collier's fourteen-year journey in unearthing the buried history of his maternal grandmother's family - a journey that took him back seven generations, from northern Mississippi to the Piedmont hills of South Carolina, and even back to a specific people and region in West Africa where his ancestry undoubtedly began. Trekking the paths of his ancestors and their displaced relatives before Emancipation (1863), this emotion-filled journey traversed down an intricate paper trail of federal, state, and local records, other public records, and oral histories, presented in a narrative style to inspire, entice, and propel readers into the fascinating world of genealogy and historical discoveries. Collier also uncovered the ways in which his ancestors ingeniously retained aspects of their African heritage. DNA technology confirmed his research findings and verified ancestral ties. The reader will gain many research tips and techniques along the journey.

150 Years Later

150 Years Later
Author: Melvin J. Collier
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Africa, West
ISBN: 9781463725686

150 Years Later is a unique story of DISCOVERY, TRIUMPH, and CELEBRATION. No other book unravels a historical mystery that led to an unprecedented family reunion. This book takes readers on a mouth-dropping quest that mended ties that were broken during slavery. In 1859 near Abbeville, South Carolina, 12-year-old Bill Reed was forever separated from his family. His father was sold away, and his mother, grandmother, and other family members were all taken away from the state soon afterwards. Waving goodbye to them, young Bill would never lay eyes on them ever again. He left South Carolina in 1866, shortly after he was emancipated, and moved to northern Mississippi after he was told that Mississippi was the "land of milk and honey with fat pigs running around with apples in their mouths." He died near Senatobia in 1937, at the age of 91, never learning that his family had been within 75 miles away from him, also in northern Mississippi. 150 Years Later is a riveting story of discovery that chronicles Collier's relentless journey of unearthing his great-grandfather Bill's mysterious history, finding his family's whereabouts and their living descendants, and breaking down barriers to mend the broken ties in an emotional reunion in 2009 - 150 years later. The involuntary break-up of families during slavery due to selling and other means was very common. However, the discovery of those lost branches and the reuniting of the descendants after 150 years is uncommon. This is what makes 150 Years Later very captivating and uplifting.

Finding a Place Called Home

Finding a Place Called Home
Author: Dee Woodtor
Publisher: Random House Reference
Total Pages: 518
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN:

"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

Sugar in the Blood

Sugar in the Blood
Author: Andrea Stuart
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2013-01-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 030796115X

In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas. As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.

Black Genealogy

Black Genealogy
Author: Charles L. Blockson
Publisher: Black Classic Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 1991
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9780933121539

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.

The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation

The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation
Author: John Baker
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2009-02-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1416570330

When John F. Baker Jr. was in the seventh grade, he saw a photograph of four former slaves in his social studies textbook—two of them were his grandmother's grandparents. He began the lifelong research project that would become The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation, the fruit of more than thirty years of archival and field research and DNA testing spanning 250 years. A descendant of Wessyngton slaves, Baker has written the most accessible and exciting work of African American history since Roots. He has not only written his own family's story but included the history of hundreds of slaves and their descendants now numbering in the thousands throughout the United States. More than one hundred rare photographs and portraits of African Americans who were slaves on the plantation bring this compelling American history to life. Founded in 1796 by Joseph Washington, a distant cousin of America's first president, Wessyngton Plantation covered 15,000 acres and held 274 slaves, whose labor made it the largest tobacco plantation in America. Atypically, the Washingtons sold only two slaves, so the slave families remained intact for generations. Many of their descendants still reside in the area surrounding the plantation. The Washington family owned the plantation until 1983; their family papers, housed at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, include birth registers from 1795 to 1860, letters, diaries, and more. Baker also conducted dozens of interviews—three of his subjects were more than one hundred years old—and discovered caches of historic photographs and paintings. A groundbreaking work of history and a deeply personal journey of discovery, The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation is an uplifting story of survival and family that gives fresh insight into the institution of slavery and its ongoing legacy today.

Akee Tree

Akee Tree
Author: Stephen Hanks
Publisher:
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781939995001

What would compel an African-American man to spend ten years of his life tracing his family tree from the Pacific Northwest back to slavery times in Mississippi, and ultimately to its African roots? For author Stephen Hanks his quest begins with mere curiosity when he reads the obituary of his uncle, and soon blossoms into a full-blown genealogical investigation. Using standard genealogical tools-interviews, census records, and other sources-he delves into the past, soon finding that he must follow two families, his own and that of those who held his ancestors in bondage. The search takes on a life of its own when Hanks discovers some of the present-day descendants of plantation owner and slaveholder Richard Eskridge. With their help he is able to follow the trail back to Colonel George Eskridge of Virginia, whose namesake was none other than George Washington, the Father of Our Country. Hanks continues to probe, and eventually identifies and visits the homeland of his ancestors in Africa. Akee Tree is not only an honest and unbiased exploration into one family's history; it is a search for identity for a man and his people. Revealing and at times painful, the reader shares the joy of discovery and the shock of realization as author Hanks uncovers the truth about his ancestors. This objective and dramatic account is a powerful testimony to those who may share the same surname today but may have come from vastly different circumstances. In the end it is an affirmation of life and a powerful invitation to reach out to each other in the spirit of reconciliation.

Your DNA Guide - the Book

Your DNA Guide - the Book
Author: Diahan Southard
Publisher:
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2020-02-26
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9781734613902

You don't have to learn everything about genetic genealogy before asking specific questions of your DNA! That's the premise of Diahan Southard's brand new book, Your DNA Guide - the Book, now available for pre-order at a special sale price. Your DNA Guide - the Book is like no other genetic genealogy book on the market. Instead of learning more-than-you-need-to-know in textbook style, you'll choose a specific DNA question to start exploring right away. You'll follow concrete step-by-step plans, learning important DNA concepts--in plain English--as you go. Do you want to learn who your 2X great grandmother is? Turn to page 23. Do you want to know how you are related to one of your DNA matches? Page 37. As you proceed, you check your progress and get new guidance based on your specific results at each stage. (Including troubleshooting, like when your matches just aren't responding or your great-grandparents turn out to be first cousins.) This powerful, hands-on approach is based on Diahan's 20 years of experience in the genetic genealogy industry and especially in the past five years, as she helps clients one-on-one make DNA discoveries. It became clear to her that while each client's situation may be unique, there are patterns in how you can find solutions that you can apply yourself. Your DNA Guide - the Book is for anyone who has taken a DNA test or may want to. It helps genealogists reconstruct family trees. It helps adoptees identify biological relatives. It can help you identify a specific DNA match. In short, it helps anyone explore what their DNA--and their DNA matches--can tell them about their origins.