Research at the National Archives&Beyond

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  

Join Author Teresa R. Kemp for a discussion of her new book "Keeper Of The Fire". This book discusses her Gullah Geechie culture and includes 480 pages of heritage research done by five generations of her family documenting their journeys across Africa to enslavement in America - representing more than 187 years of history in America. They passed down documents, a culture of faith, and a tradition of service to the community.  Mrs. Teresa R. Kemp is the 5th Generation Quilter, historian and owner of Plantation Quilts and UGRR Secret Quilt Code Museum. Born in Baumholder, West Germany to the late Dr. Howard and Serena (Strother) Wilson. She graduated from Berlin American High School and  attended Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. She transferred to West Virginia State University and  graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She also graduated from DeVry University in Atlanta, Georgia with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems.  In 2005, with her parents she opened the UGRR Secret Quilt Code Museum. A staunch advocate for conservation, healthier lifestyles for all and, as an Abolitionist, she fights Human Trafficking while researching international slavery & preserving the world’s cultural heritage.  www.PlantationQuilts.com

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 researchers in locating and accessing records of the Freedmen's Bureau, Freedmen's hospitals, contraband camps and Freedman's Bank branches. Researchers can use the website's interactive map to learn which of these services were located near their area of research interest. If the records are online, the map provides a link to the records that tell the stories of newly-freed former slaves in the American south. The goal of this mapping project is to provide researchers, from the professional to the novice, a useful tool to more effectively tell the family story, the local history and the greater story of the nation during Reconstruction. Angela Walton-Raji is an author, genealogist, guest lecturer and producer of the weekly African Roots Podcast and Toni Carrier  is the Founder of LowcountryAfricana, a free website dedicated to African American genealogy and history in SC, GA and FL.   www.mappingthefreedmensbureau.com

Rebroadcast FamilySearch is a nonprofit family history organization dedicated to connecting families across generations. FamilySearch believes that families bring joy and meaning to life. Merrill White was born and raised in Sparks, Nevada.  He graduated from BYU with a BA in History and Minor in Music.  Has worked for FamilySearch for 14 years and is currently a Product Manager for the FamilySearch Discovery Center initiative. Robert Kehrer worked for 12 years as a molecular geneticist identifying disease genes by building very large family pedigrees. He has an MBA and worked for 7 years at Apple managing strategic alliances and driving market strategy in the sciences. For the last 7 years Robert has worked for FamilySearch as a product manager in the Family History Library, overseeing the public APIs, and managing the development of FamilySearch.org beta. He is currently the senior product manager of search technologies for FamilySearch.  

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 continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. Thus the United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation with global influence. Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. It forces readers to reckon with the violence at the root of American supremacy, but also with the survival and resistance that brought about slavery’s end—and created a culture that sustains America’s deepest dreams of freedom. Edward E. Baptist is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and House Professor and Dean at the Carl Becker House at Cornell University.      

Maurice A. Barboza is the founder and CEO of National Mall Liberty Fund DC, a non-profit authorized by Public Law 112-239 to establish a memorial to African American contributions to liberty during the Revolutionary War. In September 2014, Public Law 113-176 made the National Liberty Memorial eligible for a site in Washington's Monumental Core. He said, "this memorial will remind Americans that it was their vision for America that prevailed." Mr. Barboza has written opinion pieces and spoken extensively about the 30-year quest to construct the memorial and his aunt's trail-blazing battle in the mid-1980s for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. A 2013 book, "Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall," by Kristin Haas, and a recent article in the Washington Post, "After 30 years, a site for memorial," by Tom Jackman, tell the story. National Mall Liberty Fund DC www.libertyfunddc.com    

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 of his ancestral lines. Using DNA, he was able to get back into the 1600's on one line, and this inspired his interest in Ireland's involvement with the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

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 genealogical research, photographs, and documents from his doctoral dissertation. This is a compelling and emotionally engaging history that comes alive through the lives of real people and events.  Dr. Sam Lemon grew up in Media, Pennsylvania, where his maternal great-great grandparents arrived as runaway slaves during the Civil War. Given refuge and support by local Quakers, his ancestors prospered and became prominent members of the community. He is currently an assistant professor and the director of a graduate program at Neumann University in Pennsylvania, and formerly worked in the fields of social services, education, and public television at WHYY in Philadelphia.

"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 accomplishments of our ancestors provides us not merely with a look back but a look "in."  Marrietta's Introduction... Linda Crichlow White received her B.S. from West Virginia State College and M.S. in Human Ecology from Howard University. She taught home economics in both Brooklyn and DC Public Schools before attending Catholic University, earning a Masters in Library Science. She also worked as a School Library Media Specialist in Montgomery County, Maryland prior to her retirement in 2013.  

  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 Association. Scott teaches history and law at the University of Michigan. She is also a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Genealogist Angela Walton-Raji has committed herself to sharing information with the descendants of the Freedmen of Indian Territory--which is now Oklahoma. She is the author of  the book Black Indian Genealogy Research: African American Ancestors Among the Five Civilized Tribes. The book serves as a guide to researching the history and lives of the 20,000 Freedmen of Indian Territory, who have been deleted from American history. She is also the author of the http://african-nativeamerican.blogspot.com. The Dawes Commission, named after Henry C. Dawes who chaired the commission, consisted of a process that would lead to a redistribution of land to those who already owned it among the Five "Civilized" Tribes. Understand that land was held in common by the Five Civilized Tribes. The Dawes Enrollment process was created to determine who would be eligible for allotted parcels of land. Eligibility involved providing "proof" that one had been a part of the tribe for several decades, and especially in those years immediately following the Civil War. So one had to prove that one had been a part of the Indian Community since 1866. For those whose ancestors were enslaved by members of the Tribes, (the Freedmen)  they had to often provide proof that their former enslaver was a member of the tribe.

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 judicial materials, probate data, tax lists, church records, family papers, and more, Myers creates detailed portraits of individual women while exploring how black female Charlestonians sought to create a fuller freedom by improving their financial, social, and legal standing. Examining both those who were officially manumitted and those who lived as free persons but lacked official documentation, Myers reveals that free black women filed lawsuits and petitions, acquired property (including slaves), entered into contracts, paid taxes, earned wages, attended schools, and formed familial alliances with wealthy and powerful men, black and white--all in an effort to solidify and expand their freedom. Never fully free, black women had to depend on their skills of negotiation in a society dedicated to upholding both slavery and patriarchy. Forging Freedom thus examines the many ways in which Charleston's black women crafted a freedom of their own design instead of accepting the limited existence imagined for them by white Southerners. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers earned her doctorate in American History from Rutgers University. A historian of the black female experience, she is interested in race, gender, sexuality, rights, freedom, and citizenship and the ways in which these constructs intersect with one another in the lives of black women in the Old South. She is currently Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.  

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 shameful community patterns of social and economic abuse against blacks.  Join Sharon Batiste Gillins for an engaging discussion on the genealogical value of searching records of the incarcerated. Sharon Batiste Gillins is a native of Galveston, Texas with paternal ancestral roots in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana and maternal roots in Fort Bend County, Texas. A life-long interest in her family's history led to an active involvement in researching African American family history over the past 25 years. While researching her own family, she developed an in interest in unique and under-utilized record systems and record groups.  Some of her more recent work focuses on strategies researchers can use to analyze Louisiana’s Freedmen’s Bureau field office records for revealing, often personal information on freedmen ancestors. Ms. Gillins is a member of the Galveston Historical Society, National Genealogical Society, and Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society.  A retired Associate Professor at Riverside City College, she frequently calls upon her career background as a college educator to present workshops or deliver courses at regional and national conferences and genealogical institutes.   She is also a member of the adjunct faculty at Samford Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research in Birmingham.  

  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.A. from Alma College (Alma, MI), and an M.L. from the University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC). Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations is a set of microfilms that contains images of manuscript materials from fourteen different libraries and archives across the South.  The entire set includes 1500 reels of microfilm, each with approximately 1000 frames resulting in 1.5 million manuscript images of material written primarily between the American Revolution and the Civil War. The items indexed include deeds, wills, estate papers, genealogies, personal and business correspondence, account books, slave lists, and many other types of records. Title: Index to Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations: Locations, Plantations, Surnames and Collections, 2d ed. Author: Jean L. Cooper Publisher: MacFarland, 2009 ISBN: 978-0786439904

Bernice Bennett welcomes Judy Riffel, a professional genealogist  for an engaging discussion about what you need to know about records and documents in Louisiana. Judy has authored numerous books and articles on genealogy, and she is an officer in one of the largest genealogical groups in the state, Le Comité des Archives de la Louisiane, and editor of its quarterly journal. She also offers Louisiana Genealogy Research Services: www.judyriffel.com