Progress on Projects
No real progress this week on the website because I was in a full-time class (virtually) at the Institute of Genealogy & Historical Research (IGHR). The class was “Building an African American Research Toolbox” with instructor Tim Pinnick (and we were fortunate enough to have Dr. Deborah Abbott in the class also!).
Tim shared his knowledge about finding research materials in academic libraries and I learned so much. We covered historical books, microfilm collections, scholarly journals, JSTOR, theses/dissertations, bibliographies, early 20th century magazines, newspaper research, African American organizations, fraternal orders and societies, religious resources and strategies, specialized encyclopedias, congressional hears and testimonies, the African American migration experience, black towns and suburbs, historically black colleges and universities, oral history collections, African Americans and the Civil Conservation Corps, ProQuest, the Civil War experience and its aftermath, education of African American freedmen/women, African American labor experience, railroad and Pullman Porter research, and much more!
Next year, IGHR will likely be offering Dr. Abbott’s course in African American genealogy research involving government documents, and I hope to be there.
IGHR is not the only genealogy institute to offer African-American-focused courses. IGHR will be virtual again in 2024, and most of the other Institutes have virtual options as well. You can check out the following institutes for their offerings:
Research Snippets
Another student in the class, Tamika Strong, reference archivist at the Georgia Archives, suggested a way of searching Freedmen’s Bureau records that I hadn’t used before. In the Ancestry record set, try entering the county you’re researching as the only search term. This led me to records mentioning Liberty County across all the various record types. Among many others, I found two documents involving white planter planters and freed people in disputes over horses.
In 1865, David Underwood complained to the Sapelo Island Freedmen’s Bureau office that William Joe Mallard, a white man, had stolen a horse one of Sherman’s Army officers had given Underwood, a freed man. Underwood had nursed the horse back to health, and one day Mallard just showed up and took it, saying that no [ethnic slur] had a right to have a horse. The Freedmen’s Bureau ordered return of the horse or its value, and assessed a $50 fine on Mallard, plus $1 a day for every day he had kept the horse.
In 1866, white planter William Jones gave a statement about a dispute he had had with freed man Jessie Love over a horse, and also named Titus Jones, Frank Jones and George Jones as freed men working on his plantation. One striking thing in the testimony was that Jessie Love’s wife was being “carried away” to another location and William Jones gave Jessie “permission” to go with her. So similar to the wording that would have been used before Emancipation!
Transcriptions of these records are now on the website (check “Recent Additions“) with more to come. (The next one gives information about a Liberty County man who served with the United States Colored Troops!)
What I’ve Been Reading
I ordered a copy of J. Vern Cromartie’s “Morgan-Frazier Family Clan: Chronicles of a Black Family with a Geechee and Gullah Heritage in Essays, Interviews, Research Reports, Documents, and Photographs.” It caught my eye because I’ve been working on the white Fraser family of Liberty County, and I also wanted to see the approach he took to documenting his family’s heritage. About half of the book is annotated census data on his extended family, and the rest contains essays (a case study of his family, historical notes on the Geechee people, and an obituary of Julia Frazier Cromartie Boyd), transcribed oral histories of Florence Dixon Woodard and Florence Dixon Woodard, and a self-interview, plus research reports on his extended family and the 11 children of Jordan Frazier, Sr, and Matilda Morgan Frazier. Dr. Cromartie is a Professor of Sociology at Contra Costa College and has written a number of other books and articles.