RLP 171: Print Resources for African American Research

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 171 Print Resources for an African American Research. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, The Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go, hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (49s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (51s):
Doing good. I have been working on my assignment for this study group and the first assignment, which was to get to know the close matches and the match list. And I’m using the results of my father-in-law’s third cousin who shared with me. So I’m just orienting myself within his match list, trying to figure out who they are. And I looked at some initial clustering and found a hypothesis of the cluster that I’ll be working with. So it was a pretty effective assignment.

Diana (1m 20s):
So you feel like with every DNA project, you do you learn more and get better ideas of what to do with the next one?

Nicole (1m 27s):
Yeah. It helps to try different things out and see what works best for you and for the type of project. Right. So what have you been reading?

Diana (1m 34s):
I’ve been reading my book on the Scotch Irish. The book started out in Ireland and explained some other reasons why people from Scotland were migrating over. And then it talked about why they started migrating to the United States are at the time, the colonies. And now I’m to the part where this big group has congregated in Western, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. And now the book is starting to talk a little bit about the dispersion and how when the land filled up, then second, third generation started moving south down into the Carolinas or west, into Tennessee, Kentucky, all points west.

Diana (2m 19s):
And so I’ve been just really fascinated with the time period and reading about this migration pattern and really interested in thinking about where some of our ancestors came from. So, you know, we’ve got the kittens and the Welch’s that I’m wondering if they were part of that scotch Irish group. I don’t know. What do you think?

Nicole (2m 42s):
Yeah, I think so, because they were in those areas and we think they probably could have been the origin of your red hair.

Diana (2m 53s):
Yeah, absolutely. Right. Well, it comes down through my dad and apparently there were some red hair in the Harris lane and that is the line. The Keatons and the Welch’s. So that would be fun to find out. I got that little genetic bit that came through. However, my hair isn’t as red as it used to be.

Nicole (3m 16s):
That doesn’t mean it’s not still genetically red

Diana (3m 21s):
Waiting for a grandchild to come out with red hair. So far, a lot of the grandchildren have got red highlights in the sun, but nothing really red.

Nicole (3m 32s):
We were just talking about this the other day, how our kids have blonde hair, but Lance and I both have brown hair. And I was like, well, I had blonde hair when I was a kid. So we had to get out the photo album you made for us. And I was showing everybody, look, I had blonde hair, but it really kind of turned brown by the time I was 12. So, but Jacob’s hair, my son’s hair is still blonde.

Diana (3m 52s):
Yeah. He is very blonde

Nicole (3m 53s):
And you’re thinking about it. And we were like, you know, both of our kid’s grandmas had blonde hair. You had really blonde hair when you were little. So

Diana (4m 2s):
Yeah, I was white blonde for a long time. So

Nicole (4m 5s):
It was kind of a fun discussion with the kids about, you know, you have these recessive genes that manifest themself.

Diana (4m 13s):
It is fun. It’s fun to think about our DNA and the traits that we inherited.

Nicole (4m 18s):
Yes. There’s a fun book that came out about inherited traits that I’ve blogged about before. But I think 23andMe put it out, oh, what’s the name of it? It’s so cute. I’ll find it and put it in the show notes, but it’s a children’s book about DNA and inherited traits and it has this one spread that I love where it has a big pedigree chart with the child in the middle. And it shows where the child got the red hair and the freckles from because his parents didn’t have it. And it was from two distant ancestors who both had red hair.

Diana (4m 48s):
That’s fun. I remember you talking about that book. Well, let’s get to our topic of the day, which is African American Resources. So I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the books that I have collected. I took a course in the summer of 2020 on African-American research and it was from Dr. Deborah Abbott and she brought in several experts and they had a bibliography there. And I ordered the books that were recommended. And then I also had picked up a few others. And I think sometimes we neglect the books. You know, we use a lot of online resources, which are great because there are databases and they give us the names and places and dates.

Diana (5m 35s):
But sometimes we need to go a little bit deeper or think outside of online resources so that today we could talk about some of these books and I did write a blog post on this. So you can go take a look at that. We’ll link to that in the show notes, and you can get the exact names that you don’t have to write them down and remember them, it’ll be there in the blog posts for you,

Nicole (5m 56s):
I’m excited to learn more about these books you’ve been reading. What kind of general reference books did you find?

Diana (6m 7s):
Well, in our course, they recommended 2, the first one that I want to talk about is called Finding a Place Called Home, A Guide to African American Genealogy and Historical Identity. And this is by Dee Parmer Woodtor and it was written pre-internet, but I read the entire thing and I was just fascinated with the methodology because it is just the same. It was actually copywritten the copy I have 1999. So, you know, that was just about when the internet was becoming accessible to us. Pretty sure that’s when I was using the dial up system and there were starting to be some resources online, but it goes through what you need to do from the very beginning with African-American research.

Diana (6m 58s):
And of course the first thing is just interviewing all the Ancestors that you have alive, you know, grandparents, great grandparents, getting those stories down because those are your clues. And then it takes you all the way through the common records that we think of, you know, probate discovering the last slave owner, looking at Freedman Bureau’s records, all the different things that we took that identify with for African-American research. And I just like that it’s written in a format that you can digest. And there’s lots of examples. So, you know, anyone who’s doing African-American research and you want a nice methodology book, I would highly recommend it.

Diana (7m 42s):
So it’s Finding a Place Called Home, which I think is a neat title.

Nicole (7m 46s):
I like that. So what other books did you find?

Diana (7m 49s):
The other one that was recommended in our course was the Dictionary of Afro American Slavery. And this one is a collection of essays by many, many historians, and it’s edited by Randall M Miller and John David Smith. So the thing that I like about this one is that it is really historical. So it’s written from a historian’s perspective rather than a Genealogist. We talk a lot about doing locality research and putting things in context. And that is what this book does. And it was published about the same time as the other one. It was first published in 1997, and it said that there was an earlier edition that was published in 1988.

Diana (8m 38s):
So again, this is a little bit old, but the research is still solid and still really relevant. It’s fun because one of our eminent Genealogist, Elizabeth Shown Mills contributed some of the essays here. So that was fun as I was reading through it, to find her and also her husband, Gary Mills contributed. So what I really liked is you can turn to any locality. So all the Southern states, of course, many of the United States, the Northern states practiced slavery until they outlawed it in the early 1800s. And you even have some discussion on slavery out west because slave owners would take their people out west.

Diana (9m 26s):
So whatever locality you’re researching, you can look up and read the essay and learn about what Slavery was like in that area, because it was just different in different states and different areas.

Nicole (9m 38s):
So are the essays for each state or are there ones for specific counties? How long are the essays?

Diana (9m 45s):
Well, I’m just going to look at the one in Kentucky. So they have one each state, but then some of the cities like New York City or a big cities, you’ll have a separate one. So the one for Kentucky is 17 pages long. That’s pretty good detail. And at the end of each essay, you get a selected bibliography. So if you want to dive even deeper. So for instance, the 17 page essay on Kentucky has four additional books that are specific to Kentucky and slavery. So if you are really researching a state and you want to go even deeper, you could get those.

Diana (10m 25s):
So I really liked that the essays there by different authors and so they don’t necessarily follow a format, but they do talk about the economy of the place. Where, what were the insight of people doing? Were they working more in the cotton fields or were they working in the mills or the mines because every, every area was different. So you learn a lot. It was really fascinating, but then not only the localities, you also have articles that talk about religion and churches, free blacks education, the civil war, you know, pretty much any topic you can think about.

Diana (11m 6s):
You’ll have an essay on that. And I liked that they are condensed and two shorter things that you can digest anywhere from just like a half a page to one page to like those extensive state essays, you know, it’s,

Nicole (11m 22s):
It sounds kind of like a FamilySearch Wiki type of thing, except for in book form.

Diana (11m 27s):
Yeah, it does. And a lot more detailed, a lot more detail.

Nicole (11m 32s):
Great. So what did Elizabeth Shown Mills and Gary Mills contribute to the essays?

Diana (11m 37s):
This book is organized by topic. And so you can’t really look up which essay an author did, even though you can see it. But I did find that Gary Mills did the essay on Slavery in Alabama. You know, we know that he and Elizabeth both were Southern researchers, so I cannot find exactly which one she did. So maybe somebody else can find that, or I’ll find that later. And we’ll put that in the show notes, but it’s great. I highly recommend it. And I think it was a little pricey, but I can tell it’s a resource that I’ll want to go back to again and again, whenever I’m doing a project on African-American research.

Nicole (12m 17s):
So tell us about what other books you’ve been reading and finding

Diana (12m 22s):
The next one is called Black Genesis, A Resource Book for African American Genealogy. And it’s by James Rose and Alice Eichholz. And this is one that you can get from Genealogical publishing and it covers two parts. So part one gives you an overview for Genealogist of history, sources and repositories. So again, kind of a basic methodology. It doesn’t go into near as much detail as the first book that I mentioned a place called home, but it just gives you in a nutshell, some of the things that you want to be thinking of, but then part two, which is the majority of the book, is where it goes state by state and gives you the important dates, repositories and record collections for that state specific to African-American research.

Diana (13m 12s):
And as I was looking through this again, this is an older book. This was published in 2003. So before we had so many resources online. And so it talks about a lot of things that we can easily find now online, like the census records and such. But the thing that I thought was very valuable was the list of manuscript sources for that state and where they are and what they name. And these are all relevant to African-American research. So for instance, looking at the section on South Carolina, the title is manuscript sources, personal papers, slave records, and diaries.

Diana (13m 53s):
How great is that, that they have a list. And for instance, under that, it talks about John Ball and Keating Simmons Ball and records of their plantation in Charleston district. So you get a real idea of the locations. So if you’re looking for enslaved people and you have an idea of their location, you could see if there’s plantation papers or diaries that might give you some clues. So I thought that was probably one of the most helpful things. And each section of those manuscript collections is pretty good, like two or three pages full

Nicole (14m 32s):
Well, that’s a really great resource. So you mentioned Genealogical publishing. So are we going to give away one of these books from Genealogical today?

Diana (14m 42s):
We are. Our friends at Genealogical publishing love to do giveaways. And so we will have it be a surprise, but it will be some kind of African-American resource that we will give away. So all you need to do to be entered into that is to leave a comment on the podcast page on Family Locket for this. So this is episode 171 African American Resources. You can go leave a comment and then you will get a surprise in the mail of an African-American Resource from Genealogical publishing. Great.

Nicole (15m 17s):
Okay, let’s talk next about the book Black History, A Guide to Civilian Records in the National Archives. Now I know that federal records are really important for researching African-American Ancestors. So tell us about this book.

Diana (15m 33s):
I think we all have figured out that we just don’t know everything at the National Archives, because we use the same records, right? We use the census and we know we can order military pensions and land case files that there are so much, and we do hear that, but sometimes we really are overwhelmed and we have no idea what could really help us. This book is compiled by Debra L Newman and it’s, as you mentioned, is titled Black History. And so it’s really focused on the African-American experience and what collections that you would want to explore if you are researching African-Americans and it gives you really good specifics.

Diana (16m 15s):
So let me just pull one out just for fun and see what we can find. So here’s one, I have talked a little bit about this one it’s records of the public works administration. This was actually part of FDRs programs in the 1930s. So this is a whole set of records. This record group 135, like here’s an example, a case that was affidavits of black union bricklayers, who were denied jobs on the PWA projects. Can you just imagine how many records there are that named people? And so if you knew you had an ancestor and they were working on some specific project, then maybe you could find an article or you could find a file with them.

Diana (17m 7s):
And so that sounds really, really difficult, but the index does give you some help. It has employment opportunities, lights has railroads. You know, where would you look? What would be the records for railroad employees, or if you had someone that was involved in a certain hospital there’s hospitals named in here, and it’s such a wide variety of records that are held at the national archives. So this book has in bold, as you’re reading through it specific things that you would want to look for for your African-American subjects

Nicole (17m 45s):
That’s cool. So, you know, sometimes I wonder what things are hiding the national archives that we just don’t even know exist. So it’s great to have a book that can give you some tips

Diana (17m 57s):
And they are putting a lot of the information from the book on the national archives website. They’re working on getting some of that online and it said, Archives dot gov, the title is guide to black history. So even without the book, you could go to that and get some ideas of the different collections. So Newman summarizes the record group. She explains the history of why the records were created. And then she explains the arrangement within the collection because sometimes these collections it’s just foreign to us if we were really wanting to research in them. And so she helps to clarify that some of the ones that I think would be most helpful would be the civilian conservation Corps and the works progress administration.

Diana (18m 48s):
And I did a blog post about those awhile ago. You know, those were programs started in the 1930s as part of the depression recovery. And so many African-Americans are mentioned in those records. So those are good starting points. A lot of people could be mentioned there. So, you know, you might want to start with the bigger ones, the ones that would have more people in them and the U S railroad administration is another one.

Nicole (19m 12s):
Yeah. So many people worked for the railroad

Diana (19m 15s):
And they did big employer.

Nicole (19m 18s):
All right, well, let’s move now to locality specific reference books. So if you are specializing in a certain region, of course you might want to consider investing in books that are kind of more focused in your area, especially for those of you who are becoming accredited Genealogist, like Diana you’ll want to have reference books for your area. Genealogical has several titles for African-American research in north and South Carolina, New York, Virginia, Georgia. So let’s talk about some examples of these.

Diana (19m 50s):
The set that I have is called Freedom African-Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina From the Colonial Period to About 1820. And this is by Paul Heinegg and it’s in three volumes and it’s in its sixth edition. And I love how the introduction just tells us what it’s about. So these genealogies comprising the colonial history of the majority of their free African-American families of Virginia, North Carolina described the Colonial and early national history of their communities. So these are genealogies. These are complete families that have been put together and they are listed by families surnames.

Diana (20m 34s):
So volume one has the surnames Able-Drew. So A-D R E W and then volume two starts with Driggers tomonth. So D R I G to M O N T H and then volume three takes care of the rest of the alphabet, the families surnames of More to Young. And the great thing is that each volume lists the sources for the genealogies, and it has an all named index. So if you are suspicious that your ancestor or your research subject has some free African-American ancestry, then you would want to check out these books.

Diana (21m 21s):
And in all the African-American research that I have done, you get back far enough and there generally is a branch of the family that was free. So even if you haven’t discovered one yet, it’s possible that there will be someone of your family mentioned in these books. Now the trick is that you may not have the surname. And so you would have to do more research to connect up to a surname, but wow, I was pretty blown away with how amazing those books were.

Nicole (21m 52s):
Wow. That’s amazing that each of those genealogies that has documentation and sources, that would be really helpful.

Diana (21m 59s):
Yeah. And they’re the sources that we commonly use, you know, censuses, probate court records, land records, and the free African-Americans are mentioned in those records in the colonial times. So like I said, it goes to about 1820. So you do have to get past the difficult years after 1820 to connect up. But if you can connect up, you could have a really gold mine and it could save you a lot of time. And then you could go and verify and look up the records yourself, which I think is always valuable because you always seem to find more when you look at the actual source, we always teach looking at the original source.

Diana (22m 42s):
Even if you find the Genealogy in a book like this.

Nicole (22m 48s):
Yeah. I think that’s a good starting point, but then we have to go check out the information ourselves, especially an older books. This one’s probably better because it has good documentation, but I was working with an older book that was published a long time ago. And in some of the people had gotten merged together and, you know, the author was working with so many people that he just, you know, he didn’t have the time to really sort out all these descendants. I just found the one that I was working on was a little bit converged with another person. So yeah, we always have to verify and check and use it as a starting point, but it’s still helpful.

Diana (23m 23s):
It’s always helpful to use those genealogies. They can save you a lot of time in pointing you towards the right people or the right connections. So anyway, there are many, many more resources, but that’s all that we will cover today. And I hope everyone who is doing some African-American research came with at least one title. That sounded interesting. I think it’s just really good for us to broaden our reach of things that will help us in our research. When we come to the end of what we think we can do, there’s always more that we can learn about more places to search.

Diana (24m 3s):
So hopefully this gave you some ideas. Yeah.

Nicole (24m 6s):
Yeah. It was a good idea to, to look at that Dictionary that had the essays from historians, because we really can gain a lot from historians and the researchers because they will do very similar things that genealogists do. And the product of their work is usually some kind of publication that is about a specific place in time that we can use to understand our ancestors better.

Diana (24m 30s):
Yeah. We are family historians. And so we should never neglect the work that historians and other fields do.

Nicole (24m 37s):
All right. Well, thanks for sharing those resources with us and hopefully you guys will put a comment in and see if you can win a fun African-American resource for a prize.

Diana (24m 47s):
All right, everyone have a great week. All

Nicole (24m 49s):
Right, we’ll talk to you guys again next week. Bye bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our Research Like a Pro online course or join our next Study Group. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com to share your progress and ask questions. Join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our e-course or Study Group. If you like what you heard and would like to support this podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.