IMLS funding cut - just another dangerous way that federal government cuts are hurting society...

 https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article302427449.html#campaignName=kansascity_morning_newsletter

Feedback from recent client:

I always send a feedback survey after sending the report/ results of my research to a client, and received back this review:  

I loved being able to talk to you via Zoom before you started the project. You were very clear about timelines and cost. I really appreciate everything you did and update you gave us partway through your work. - B. Roberts

African American (Smithsonian) Museum of History and Culture - and Ten Million Names

 

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit the Smithsonian's National African American Museum of History and Culture on the Mall in Washington DC. It's a very well thought out presentation of the heartache and the triumph of the African American experience in North America/ the United States. 

You start at the bottom and work your way up from seeing how life was on slave ships and early origins of slavery in the US to the struggle against slavery and the Civil War, Reconstruction (a very overlooked period of history) up to the Civil Rights struggle of the Jim Crow era/late 1800s and all through the twentieth century. Along the way, much about culture - from African origins to modern day popular culture - think sports, music, etc - is woven into the story. 

This map shows the migration route of those who had been enslaved in the "upper south" during the tobacco era (Virginia, Maryland, Delaware) further south to often larger plantations where cotton or rice were the main crops. But many powerful individual stories are told at all eras. And there is a whole section of the museum for doing genealogy research, the Smithsonian's Robert Frederick Smith Family History Center. What a great resource! 

This display: 

details the African and Middle Eastern languages that influenced the Gullah language of South Carolina and Georgia, and which also has influences in Black American speech generally. 

I recently also came upon the Ten Million Names project which is devoted to recovering, restoring and remembering African American family history, the ancestors who, despite the tragedy and violence of slavery, were able to leave their names in records, who tried valiantly to reunite with family after 1865 and at other times, whose names are recorded in American records, whose history is such an important part of American history. The Ten Million Names website is also a great place to start on researching African American family history. As a person whose ancestors William and Mary (Thorne) Fowler in Flushing NY in 1698 had a "Negro Jack" in their household, I have been contemplating how I might personally address the legacy of slavery. Volunteering with the Ten Million Names Project to transcribe information from original documents into spreadsheets to aid the digitization of records so that more African Americans will be able to find and document their ancestry seems like a small way to help heal the legacy of slavery. 

Book on Indigenous persistence in the Adirondacks

 

I recently read this book, written by Melissa Otis and published in 2018. Titled Rural Indigenousness: A History of Iroquoian and Algonquian Peoples of the Adirondacks, it takes a deep dive into the evidence that many Indigenous people, mainly Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, and Abenaki folks, stayed in the Adirondack mountains and areas bordering them through many decades and centuries after "supposedly" they had been driven out. They adapted and persisted in living a life tied to the rhythms of the natural world, deployed creative strategies to survive in a harsh climate and in an environment of ethnic tension, maybe even rising to the level of "whitewashing."  Often people had to pass as white to survive in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I grew up going to the Adirondacks every summer, and we would pass by "trading posts" which sold real leather moccasins, balsam pillows, and other products connected to the Native North American cultures indigenous to this area between Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain, south of the St. Lawrence River. Little did I realize that most of these "trading posts" were actually run by indigenous people who were very selective as to when and how, and to whom, they revealed their ethnicity. Census records showed them shifting back and forth between being identified as "white" and as "Indian" - not out of dishonesty but out of the need for survival. They taught newcomers to the mountains the ways of surviving in this rugged wilderness - how to make and use snowshoes for transportation, how to make baskets from natural materials, how to peel bark on a large scale for use in tanning hides, how to survive by fishing, hunting, gathering, and also by serving as guides for wealthy tourists who wanted an experience of roughing it for weeks at a time in the woods. They were the folks who identified iron deposits that could later be mined, they were the scouts who helped surveyors and railroad developers decide where to lay tracks based on the topography that they knew intimately.  They worked as midwives, imparting knowledge and care for birthing babies in the absence of doctors, they worked in lumber camps and mills, both with the lumber directly and as cooks, waitresses and launderers for the camps. They trapped beaver and other wildlife for their furs, as had been the main engine of the economy in this region from the earliest (1630s) French and Dutch settlement to the north and south of the mountains respectively. They piloted rafts and boats on the waterways, shared water routes through the mountains, told stories and fortunes, made and left pots, collected spruce gum for the chewing gum industry and more. In some ways they were very marginalized, but depending on perspective, they were the true Adirondackers, as Otis lays out for us. The Adirondack guide boat was probably designed by some of these people, as was the Adirondack pack basket, based on an Abenaki design. They maintained ties with their reserve/ reservation communities, but also often intermarried with non-Native people, sharing their cultures with others. Many Adirondack "mountain men" and "hermits" (who were the subject of folklore that even I remember) learned about how to live here from Mohawk, Abenaki, and other Indigenous people. Otis spells out for us how false is the narrative of the "vanishing Indian," since they did persist in this region, and have developed cultural centers to help us learn. You can visit the Shako:wi Cultural Center, the Iroquois Museum, the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center, and Fort de la Présentation, among other places that will give you a window into the cultural heritage of this part of northeastern New York State. Native people have always been here, gave names to the places here, and are ready to teach us, something possibly new about the history of this very beautiful and rugged land. Otis gives a window into this learning opportunity. 

Note: Melissa Otis writes in her introduction about the problems of names and labels for this topic, these peoples, indicating how complex the history is. I have simplified naming here for the sake of readability, and defer to her explanation of how complicated names are. I recommend reading her book, especially if you have been to this beautiful place! 

Genealogy takes time!

 

When I started researching my family history decades ago (in the 1990s), I never dreamed that it would take so long and that I would still look at a giant project 30 years later, and that, still mainly only on one side of the family. Genealogy is a marathon, not a sprint, and just researching the timeline of one ancestor's life can take many months. This is not only because finding the records to document everything in their timeline takes time (even though Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org will present you with possibly documents easily), but evaluating and comparing documents like census records takes time, and then you find more clues in those records, so you track down other leads and clues. Keeping it all organized is key, and this includes making a research plan, keeping a research log, taking good notes, reviewing frequently, analyzing and writing up conclusions that then lead to more questions. I've been researching one family line for 8 years, and still feel like I have much work to do in building out that part of the tree. 

I came across this document in family papers that I ended up with, and it seems like a mystery to me. Why did my great-grandfather's sister, living in New Brunswick, Canada, file with the Canadian government for proof of her brother's age, a few months after he died? And he died in the US, having emigrated from Canada in the 1890s, and having been awarded US citizenship in 1920. Another family mystery to solve! This could tack on months to my project of building out this particular branch and timeline... here goes! 

If you find yourself in need of a consultation or coaching session about doing your own genealogy project, please let me know. I'd be happy to consider that. Some people want to do their own family history research but don't always know where to begin. Message me to get started and see what's possible!

History and Legacy of Native American Boarding Schools and Survivors

 As genealogists, we often find ourselves unraveling complex historical narratives through family histories. One of the most challenging and poignant chapters in North American history is the story of Native American boarding schools and their survivors.

From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, and for some even earlier, Native American children were forcibly removed from their families and communities to attend hundreds of government-run, or church-run/ government-sponsored boarding schools. The stated goal was to "civilize" these children by stripping them of their cultural identities, languages, and traditions.

Hundreds of these institutions were established across the United States and Canada. Many students died, and those who survived carried the trauma of this separation from their families and communities and denial of their heritage and culture. Many students were given new "English" or "Christian" names and denied use of their own names, making them hard to trace. Separation from their cultures broke the bonds of oral history and passing down heritage through storytelling. Some of the churches who ran the schools did not want their records being researched.

Now, the National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive, part of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, has digitized many records from the schools so that the truth can come out and the healing can begin. Kudos to all those involved in this worthy effort.

 

For this month of Latino/a heritage, I thought I would share a little history about languages here in North America... we may all have heard of Ponce de Leon and the fountain of youth (OK, or maybe not, but roll with me!) but to stop and think about it, when you wonder what was the first European language spoken (and first permanent settlement), it was SPANISH in what's now Florida in 1565 - that's not a typo - 1565 -  just 73 years after Columbus' first voyage. Pedro Menendez de Aviles was the first governor of Florida in that year. ("Florida" means "flowery" so there must have been lots of beautiful flowers growing in the region of St. Augustine, Florida at that time.) That settlement in what is now the northeast corner of the state of Florida is the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the US.  And then, there was New Mexico (Santa Fe as its capital)... in 1610, whereas the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock (now Massachusetts) in 1620. Jamestown Virginia was established in 1607, so the Virginians beat the Plymouth Mayflower folks by 13 years. 

And as a little "lagniappe" (or extra, in New Orleans creole speak), Quebec (New France) was founded by the French in... 1608, just a year after Jamestown. So we had Spanish and French way early in North America. But hopefully this gives a little perspective on languages spoken on these shores, in addition to the thousands of Indigenous languages that were already well established before these Europeans ever came ashore. What languages did your ancestors speak?