Ancestor's Footprints with Bernice Alexander Bennett

Forgotten Black Soldiers Who Served in White Regiments During The Civil War: Volumes I and II     Dr. Juanita Patience Moss is the great granddaughter of a Civil War veteran, the granddaughter of a northeastern Pennsylvania entrepreneur who became an anthracite coal carver, and the daughter of a unique coal sculptor who was featured in the EBONY Magazine (March 1970). A former high school biology...

James H. Commander utilized genealogical research techniques to author his book, Love At Our Roots: How Freedom Became A Force For Change. His book has been accepted into the prestigious Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, as well as, the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History in Atlanta, Georgia. His lecture focuses on using family research...

Why the New York Times is Wrong – Using Basic Genealogy Tools and Methods to Show that Your Family Name Was Not Changed At Ellis Island. There is a common misconception, call it an old wives tale or an urban legend, that family names were often changed at Ellis Island.  Such myths gain a great deal of credibility when newspapers such as the New York Times, the country’s “paper of record”, perpetua...

The Truth About The Lowman Family Lynchings in Aiken, South Carolina Rennard East is a hip hop artist/ songwriter from Philadelphia, PA and one of his new passions is genealogy because he knew nothing about his ancestors when growing up.  Patricia Lowman Pryor has always wondered about the truth concerning her grandmother Bertha Lowman and will share her research and discovery behind this story. H...

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the official repository of the permanently valuable records of the U.S. Government.  NARA's vast holdings document the lives and experiences of persons who interacted with the Federal Government.  The records created by post-Civil War Federal Agencies are perhaps some of the most important records available for the study of black family li...

Using Civil Rights Records to Find The Story In Your Community and Family Please join genealogist and family historian Antoinette Harrell for a discussion of how and why researchers will want to explore the Civil Rights records to find relatives that were engaged in the Civil Rights movement throughout the South.  Ms. Harrell will use a case example of Mr. Herbert Lee a Civil Rights leader from Am...

"THE BLACK LOGGERS OF WALLOWA COUNTY, OR" In 1923, the Bowman-Hicks Lumber Company of Missouri built Maxville, a logging camp in Wallowa County, Oregon and brought 40-60 African American loggers as part of the labor pool.  This project uses genealogy research methods to reconstruct the social history of these workers. Dr. Pearl Alice Marsh (Ph. D.) is a retired foreign policy expert and now spends...

Many Americans of African descent have thought that connecting with their African kin was next to impossible, yet Carol Hector-Harris has done just that. Not only did she visit Ghana but she also met relatives. She is the fifth great-granddaughter of Africa-born Quock Martrick, who served in the Revolutionary War with George Washington in New York. She found Martrick's family, HER FAMILY, in Big A...

Solomon Northup's descendants share their insights. Vera J. Williams - President of the Solomon Northup Foundation Justin Gilliam - Chief Executive Officer Clayton J. Adams - Historian and Executive Director Eileen Jackson - Regional Director Linsey Rae Williams - Social Media Director http://solomonnorthupfoundation.com   Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ancest...

Did you know that the majority of Freedmen's Bureau records are now digitized and available online for free, as well as the records of other institutions that served newly-freed African Americans during Reconstruction? Angela Walton-Raji and Toni Carrier have built a new website called "Mapping the Freedmen's Bureau - An Interactive Research Guide" (www.mappingthefreedmensbureau.com) to assist res...

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a c...

What role did the Irish play in the Transatlantic slave trade? Were the Irish ever enslaved or slave owners? Join my special guest, Dr. Maurice Gleeson for a compelling overview of Ireland and the Slave Trade. Dr. Maurice Gleeson is a psychiatrist from Dublin who works in London as a pharmaceutical physician. He is an avid genealogist and has traced his Irish family tree back to about 1800 on half...

GO STAND UPON THE ROCK (2014) is a deeply moving Civil War-era novel based on stories handed down by Sam Lemon's grandmother about the lives of her grandparents who were once runaway slaves from Virginia. It is a tale of unsettling plantation life, courageous women, dramatic Civil War battles, heroes, hoodoo, and the indomitable strength of the human spirit. The book is supported by historical and...

"Whenever Mommy tells stories of the past, she usually begins with Back There, then..." Linda Crichlow White BACK THERE, THEN  was written by Marietta Stevens Crichlow in the 1990s and discovered by her daugther Linda Crichlow White in 1999. Linda will share her story and offer words of wisdom to others considering writing a historical genealogy memoir. A working knowledge of the lives and accompl...

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. Allyson Hobbs is an assistant professor in the history department at Stanford.  She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and she received a Ph. D. with distinction from the University o...

  Rebecca J. Scott, author of Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation, and co-authored with Jean M. Hébrard, will discuss how they traced one family across five generations and three continents, into slavery and then back into freedom. Freedom papers is the 2012 Recipient of the Albert J. Beveridge Award and the James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History - American Historical...

Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston For black women in antebellum Charleston, freedom was not a static legal category but a fragile and contingent experience. A deeply researched social history, Forging Freedom reveals the ways in which black women in Charleston acquired, defined, and defended their own vision of freedom. Drawing on legislative and judi...

Have you ever considered searching records of incarceration to find your ancestors?  Whether researching a notorious family outlaw or a victim of early 20th century justice, there’s a good chance that you have an ancestor who has been incarcerated. Researching records of incarceration at local, state or federal penal institutions can reveal valuable family history information and also document sha...

  Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations with Jean L. Cooper Welcome, Jean L. Cooper, a Cataloger and Reference Librarian, and Genealogical Resources Specialist at the University of Virginia Library.  Ms. Cooper received the Virginia Genealogical Society’s Virginia Records Award in 2009 for her work in indexing the Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations microfilm collection. She has a B....

  Michael N. Henderson, Author, Lecturer, Family History Researcher will explore the reasons why leaving a legacy of your genealogy research is important. Michael Nolden Henderson, Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy retired,  began his genealogy journey almost 30 years ago. Henderson is the author of Got Proof! My Genealogical Journey Through the Use of Documentation, his memoir detailing his discove...

Join genealogist, Sharon Batiste Gillins for a discussion of Record Group 105 of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. She will share her experiences in locating records in this rich genealogical resource available at the National Archives. The Freedmen's Bureau was established in the War Department by an act of Congress on March 3, 1865. The life of the Bureau was extended twice...

Join Joseph McGill for a discussion on site in a slave cabin at the Hopsewee Plantation in Georgetown County, South Carolina. Since May 2010, Joseph McGill has spent a night in over 50 extant slave dwellings in the states of Alabama, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, all in an attempt to bring much ne...

The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation: Stories of My Family’s Journey to Freedom with John F. Baker Jr. Genealogy expert John F. Baker Jr. was born in 1962, in Springfield, Tennessee and has lived his entire life just a few miles from Wessyngton Plantation, in a town populated by hundreds of descendants of its slaves. His book, The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation: Stories of My Family’s Jo...

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the Law School where she also holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mosell...

The Slaves Have Names: Ancestors of my Home tells the stories of the people who were enslaved on the plantation where Cumbo-Floyd was raised in Central Virginia.  It’s the story of her journey to get to know these extraordinary people and to understand her debt to them as well as our nation’s continued struggles around race and the legacy of slavery. Andi Cumbo-Floyd is a writer, historian, and ge...