In a clean and bright room on St. Thomas, buried treasure is waiting to be found. The Caribbean Genealogy Library, founded in 2000, holds a treasure trove of historical documents to help Virgin Islanders trace their family trees. Loaded with resources and knowledgeable volunteers passionate about research, the tiny nonprofit library is the only one of its kind in the Caribbean region - and people travel from across the globe to use its valuable resource. "We get a lot of inquiries from around the world, people who are finding they had ties to the Virgin Islands," library President Rob … [Read more...]

A Tribe Called Quest's Q-Tip tests his DNA to trace back his African ancestral roots. … [Read more...]

More than 150 years before University of Kentucky basketball star Valerie Still and her brother, Art Still, an All-American football standout, were on campus, their ancestors lived and worked in the vicinity as slaves. The information came as a surprise to Valerie Still, the New Jersey native who is the UK women's all-time leading scorer and rebounder. And it enticed her to explore more about her family, which has a rich history in America dating back to the 1700s. Read more … [Read more...]

Betty Kilby Baldwin and Phoebe Kilby live the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream every day. In his famous and oft-repeated “I Have a Dream” speech, given on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1963, he spoke of a day when “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” For Baldwin and Kilby, that day was in 2007 on Jan. 15 — King’s birthday — and it wasn’t at a table but across cyberspace.  Read More … [Read more...]

Catonsville family traces roots to Virginia settlers in 1600s A century ago, the Page family settled in Catonsville, founded a church and operated the neighborhood grocery out of the front rooms of a home on Winters Lane. Still, the family's 99-year-old matriarch, Eva Page Brooks — whose living room was once that family store — could not trace its history back more than a few generations. But thanks to the Internet and a DNA sample, the Catonsville clan has become the first black family — and the first Baltimoreans — to verify their descent from two 17th- and 18th-century settlers of … [Read more...]

Early African American Landowners From the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, Fairfax County counted 66 African American landowners. In that short time span, those new owners accumulated substantial holdings and were both remarkably productive with their land use and remarkably supportive of their burgeoning communities. ...Read More... Giving African-American history a home in Baltimore County It's easy to miss the little two-story, boarded-up house behind the Historical Society of Baltimore County in Cockeysville. Known as "the Pest House," it was once a haven for patients … [Read more...]

Digging up family trees When Glen Ming started researching his family tree in 1995 he didn't know his grandfather's name. Since then he has become an expert on Bermudan genealogy and is working to complete an index or births, marriages and deaths in Bermuda up to the year 2000. Grant funds creation of online slave database The Virginia Historical Society recently received a $100,000 grant from Dominion Resources and The Dominion Foundation to fund the creation of "Unknown No Longer: A Database of Virginia Slave Names." This free, online database will contain personal information about … [Read more...]

Jean Toomer's Conflicted Racial Identity @ The Chronicle Review Did Jean Toomer consider himself black, mixed or American? Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. commissioned biographical research that included census records, two draft registrations, his marriage license to the white writer Margery Latimer, and his statements to the news media in an effort to disect Toomer's conflicted racial identity. New exhibit looks to unravel 'Red/Black' connection @ Indianapolis Star A new exhibit that opens Saturday, Feb. 12 in Indianapolis at the Eiteljorg Museum. The exhibit stems … [Read more...]

Two years ago I purchased a fancy microfilm reader.  Here it is, sitting on a table in the back of my office: And here is the microfilm collection I planned to work on transcribing, tucked away in a corner of my office: This past Christmas I bought myself a fancy scanner with the intention of scanning my photos and documents. Here's a picture of it sitting on my desk: I have Family Tree Maker 2000 (?) installed on my computer, which means my GEDCOM file is outdated by about 9 - 10 years (hangs head in shame). I have a lot of the new births/deaths/anniversaries/divorces that occured … [Read more...]

When Raymond Reddick began going through his grandmother’s attic after she passed away in 1985, he stopped to look through a box of pictures. Inside were photographs of his family members going back several generations. For Reddick, it was just the beginning of an investigation into his family’s history that would take him from Boston to Connecticut to Chicago, and finally to a grave in Dorchester’s Cedar Grove cemetery. His imagination fired by the photographs, Reddick immediately wondered how he could match names to the unidentified faces. “I decided to take advantage of all of … [Read more...]