I had the pleasure today of talking with Bernice Bennett about the They Had Names project on her podcast Ancestors’ Footprints! If you’re not familiar with the podcast, it started some years ago as Research at the National Archives and Beyond. It had a short hiatus, then restarted as Ancestors’ Footprints. She features interviews with genealogists, mostly about African American genealogy and history. It’s a wonderful podcast and I’m a big fan.
We talked about how I got started with the project, my personal connection to slavery in Liberty County (and to the records), the homestead exemption records recently added and the 70+ transcripts of U.S. Southern Claims Commission petitions on the website, the redesign of the website and the downloadable books, and the wonderful Susie King Taylor museum in Hinesville.
Listen on Apple podcasts at: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ancestors-footprints-with-bernice-alexander-bennett/id1800493184
Or on Spreakr.com at: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/they-had-names-a-digital-archive-with-stacy-ashmore-cole–67880687
I experimented today with uploading the five downloadable PDFs already created to FamilySearch.org’s book catalog and to Archive.org. FamilySearch.org could take some time to add them, if they accept them, but they’re instantly available on Archive.org. The beauty of Archive.org is that it converts them into other formats, so if you prefer to read them on your ereader, for example, that’s possible. See an example here: https://archive.org/details/they-had-names-liberty-county-georgia-estate-inventories-1824-1849. Search for “They Had Names” (using the quotation marks) at Archive.org to find all of them (and future files).