Genealogist Paul Heinegg and I at the 2019 Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS) Conference, Univ. of Maryland When I started actively researching my family history in 1993, I quickly learned of genealogist Paul Heinegg’s wonderful publication, “Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina from the Colonial Period to about 1820,” which …
Category: History
Deeds and DNA Took Me Back to ‘Old Virginny’
https://youtu.be/YOqWIS-QS-0 Short clip: Visiting the area in Lunenburg County, Virginia where my great-great-grandmother, Jane Parrott Ealy, was taken away from c. 1839 and brought to Leake County, Mississippi. DNA revealed that family still lives there! In the early 1990s, when I first found Robert & Jane Ealy, my great-great-grandparents, in the 1870 and 1880 censuses, …
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More Than Just Names: Incorporating Social and Community History Into Your Research
Click image to register or see Zoom link below. I am very excited about this opportunity to co-teach on this upcoming webinar with genealogist and author, Robyn Smith. We both have busy federal careers, but we have maintained an active passion for genealogical and historical research for over two decades. Like many researchers, we get …
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Free, Alone with Young Children to Raise
My grandfather's baby sister, Martha Reed Deberry (1891-1971), who passed down history about her maternal grandmother, Polly Partee, who was an enslaved cook. Juneteenth commemorates the announcement of the abolition of slavery in Galveston, Texas on 19 June 1865. The Emancipation Proclamation, that had an effective date of 1 January 1863, did not immediately emancipate …
Slavery, the Church, and their Record-keeping
Padgett's Creek Baptist Church, Union County, South Carolina (photo source) In America, the carefully orchestrated process of converting Africans to Christianity began in earnest during the Great Awakening of the 1730s, intensifying in the late eighteenth century. In their minds, white preachers and slave-owners aimed to “save” enslaved African Americans by showing them their perceived …
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I Ain’t Taking Massa’s Name
Stephen, Eliza, and their children were inventoried in the estate of John Hebron, 1862, Warren County, Mississippi. They selected the surname HUNT. Disclaimer: Most of this post was taken from my 2012 article entitled, “Ain’t Gonna Take Massa’s Name.” Because of the popularity of the topic and misunderstandings about the surnames of African Americans, I …
Six Degrees of Separation and Genealogy
Dr. L. M. McCoy (1882-1960)Picture Source: Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church , “Mission Photograph Album - Portraits #05 Page 107,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed July 5, 2020 This picture of Dr. Lee Marcus McCoy reminds me of the theory known as “six degrees of separation.” This theory contends that everyone in the …
“Y’all Are As Free As I Am”
The old plantation home of Lemuel Reid, just north of Abbeville, South Carolina, as it stood in 2009. On September 22, 1862, five days after the Union won the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland, President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that as of January 1, 1863, "all persons held as slaves …
Madam M. E. Hockenhull: A 1914 National Negro Business League Convention Presenter
The picture caption: “Madam M. E. Hockenhull as she stood before Dr. Booker T. Washington and thousands of others (both white and colored) and demonstrated millinery, dress-making, and beauty culture, at the National Negro Business League, Muskogee, Oklahoma, Aug. 19-21, 1914.” (Source: Book of Introduction of Improved Method in Beauty Culture, Mme. Hockenhull's System, by …
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A Tuskegee Airman and His Civil War Soldier Grandfather
I have a big regret. I didn’t drive down to Warrenton, North Carolina to meet the late Joel Foster Miller. He had taken the AncestryDNA test, and he shares a significant amount of DNA with me, my mother, and her siblings. When I say “significant,” I don’t mean that he was probably their unknown half-brother. …
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Roots Revealed 