Tips for researching African -American families and telling their stories

For many African Americans, it is a challenge to pursue their family roots. This is primarily due to slavery, frequently occurring name changes and limited data records. For the Black History Month, the Kukua Institute organized a genealogy workshop in the city center of Pensacola, which should give the participants more tools to discover their ancestors and tell their stories.

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The workshop “Research into her family. Tell your story, ”was organized by Robin Reshard, the director of the Kukua Institute, as well as an award-winning local historian and storyteller. The workshop was divided into three different areas: basics of genealogy, literary research and methods for telling stories.

“And all of this is about how we humans pull out of paper and make them with all these amazing experiences and stories about this full person”, “ Said Reshard, who found, should not only concentrate on when people born and died, but also what happened during their lives.

This means to tell the story between the truth, the facts and what it calls.

“Take oral history, take genealogical records, census data and so many other publicly available records and combine those with the oral stories that we are from our parents, from our great -grandparents, from our neighbors – the good, the bad and the ugly, from ours Combining great -grandparents – and really telling the whole story of our human experience. So this focused on African -American experience. “

Dr. John Veasley, member and former Vice President of West Florida Genealogical Society, focused on the basics of genealogy. How he, when he started his own research, when his father died, he says he should build with himself and then learn from older family members what they can do.

“I remember that my most strenuous supporter was my mother,” said Veasley. “I would ask: 'Did you know? Do you know this person? Do you know this person? Did you hear from this name? From this name? 'And she could tell me things that helped me better know what my results were, whether they made sense, whether these were actually people in the family they knew. “

Family bibs, death ads, cemeteries, church records, censuses and real estate recordings are good resources as well as birth, death, marriage and military information. If you exist, many of these data records are available on websites such as Familysearch.

“You can set up your own family tree,” added Veasley. And it's free; That is the good part. “

Today people share family information and photos on social media. DNA is another tool that has been available in recent years. Through the DNA, Veasley was able to trace its roots back to the Djola people living in Guinea-Bissau. But he warns against being prepared for surprises.

“If you carry out DNA tests, all of these secrets that your family did not tell you, you will be there,” he said, adding that it had helped him find other people he didn't know about. “And we were able to connect by being a great-grandfather, a great-great-grandfather. And through my descent, DNA, I was able to find so many family members on my mother and father's side. “

Nevertheless, most blacks in the United States can only follow their roots before the path becomes cold.

“Yes, there are roadblocks and the largest roadblock is American slavery,” said Veasley, confirming that Blacks were only entered in census recordings in 1870. Before that, he estimated that free blacks that could appear in records with names only made about 11% of the entire black population. “So your information was recorded. I was lucky to find the Freeedmen Bureau of Labor Contracts that bring me back to at least 1845. “

Other hurdles contain incorrect data in the census and other data records, especially when it comes to the age groups and names of people. Veasley has found at least eight different spellings of his own name.

“But they take the names they find and the family members who are connected to this person so that they can make sure that they can make the same person from the census to the census and in the years and birth data, these things, and this things Talk about things. He suggested. “These will fluctuate due to the season and the person who gives the information.”

Veasley is advisable to take the time to look at the actual list recording – not just the summary, and do not trust a single source.

According to the award -winning public historian Joe Vinson, many other resources are available after genealogy -specific tools to bring family research to the next stage.

“Newspapers that were digitized, many archives and libraries with digital collections,” Vinson began. “One of the first places that I always look at is Newspapers.com. You have the Pensacola News and the Pensacola Journal. These are available for searching for the 19th century. “

While newspapers are a great resource to find people who have been mentioned to do something that may be new, there was a time when the African Americans were largely excluded from the story.

“The fact is that Pensacola News and Pensacola Journal have not been particularly interested in reporting about black pensacola for many years,” said Vinson. “So there are newspapers that were specifically for the black community, the colored citizens who were pensacola voice. And these are available in certain archives, but they are not necessarily digitized. So it is a little more difficult to explore this. “

Vinson learned that local information can be found outside the area while examining a man named Walker Thomas for the obituary of the Pensacola News Journal and corresponds to the past.

“He was a correspondent for Pensacola for National African -American newspapers, Indianapolis Freeman and the New York age,” said Vinson. “Although local papers who have reported on these things may not have been held back in archives, thanks to Walker Thomas, who reports on it, we have snapshots from Pensacola's Black Community. And that was printed in newspapers in Indianapolis and New York, which can be preserved and can search digitally. So if you throw a wide network, you will probably find some really interesting information. “

The Chronicling America project of the Library of Congress, the National Archives Catalog and the Florida memory are among the state and federal collections. UWF Libuides currently has access to 315 databases, including Ebsco, Newsbank and Proquest.

Local physical archives are available on the second floor in the UWF Historic Trust, voices of the Pensacola Multicultural Center. University Archives and West Florida History Center; UWF PACE library, cellar; West Florida Public Library Main department, second floor; and Escambia Clerk of Court Public Records Center. There are also city directories Sanborn Maps and aerial photos.

For people with roots in Pensacola, Vinson joined the research team from the West Florida Genealogy Society to create the mosaic of 1821, which is known to live in Pensacola and the 200^TH Escambia County anniversary.

In order to exercise some of their new skills, the workshop participants were invited to take part in a case study on myrtle Johnson Watson Brown, in Pensacola -based. She was a licensed, trained beautician and public school teacher who was born in 1916. Half of the room fought for her mother's census documents while the other half was looking for her father.

“He is there,” said a workshop visitor when he found the family in the 1920 census. “Oh yes, he's there. It's so cool, ”replied another.

In order to reconcile all information about her family, Reshard Brown's granddaughter invited to confirm and fill out details.

“There is a context for them; it is not only this person a supplier, but 'Oh, they provided ice cream for the Lewis Bear Company,” said Reshard as an example.

Sherry Pond was one of the participants who were taken from the workshop with new strategies for the start of their own family research.

“This was very helpful in the sense that it helped me to realize what I should look for where I can find information,” said Teich.

Reshard's advice is to be curious and to continue asking and looking, because it may be more to be found. As with the discovery of her family's school records in a house of the early 1900s in a house that is to be torn down, she believes that a rare school year book, a personal letter or a photo of her ancestor is probably in the archives of a person.

“I am determined to know that someone has a photo,” she said. “Someone has it.”