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.