history
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Was My Grandma the Daughter of Her Mother’s White Employer?
I would like to know where my paternal grandmother, Mariah Green (also spelled Maria or Marie; maiden name unknown), is buried, as well as who her parents were. She was born circa 1888 in Bastrop County, Texas. My father is her son, Floyd Green. According to family oral history, she was the daughter of Yager…
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I Am Black but Discovered I Have Jewish DNA. Where Is It From?
I’m African American, but about a year ago I received the results of genetic testing, which indicated that I’m 5 percent Ashkenazi Jew. My European genetic makeup is around 15 percent. Family lore (which, of course, can be notoriously unreliable) shared stories about possible Native American ancestry, but Native American ancestry wasn’t part of my…
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Were My Black Texan Ancestors Free and Half-Blackfeet?
My family oral history is adamant about my great-great-great-grandfather Joe Wheaton (also spelled Weeden, Whedon, Wheedon and Wheadon) being one-half Blackfeet Indian and never enslaved. Joe Wheaton (born circa 1833) and his brothers, Monday, John and Henry, arrived in Midway, Madison County, Texas, in 1848, per the 1867 voter-registration list for Madison County. It may…
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Were My Ancestors in an Interracial Love Triangle?
My research into my family origins reveals that in the 1680s, Maudlin Magdelen Magee, an Irish woman who was married to a white man, George Magee, had a baby girl by an enslaved African man, Sambo Game. The Magees had come to Somerset, Md., from Ireland, and had two sons of their own when Maudlin…
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Finding Your Roots Returns to PBS With New Episodes
The past always informs the future, and never more so these days than in Finding Your Roots, the PBS program hosted by renowned scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor and the founding director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is also chairman of The Root. “There is something…
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My Ancestor’s Name and Race Changed in Census Records. Why?
I recently discovered that I have an ancestor listed as “mulatto” on the 1850 and 1860 census records. Her name is Amelia “Millie/Milly” A. Moreland, born in 1818 in Virginia. She is listed as living with William White Mullin and three children, Richard Winfield Scott Moreland, Anna R.C. Moreland and Mary J.V. Moreland—all children also…
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My Cherokee Ancestors Never Went West. Can I Be a Citizen?
I have a great-great-great-great-great-grandmother who was on the 1817 Cherokee Roll: Lucy Briant, No. 91. But she didn’t go to Oklahoma with the Trail of Tears. She was in Tennessee. Would I still be eligible for Cherokee citizenship? —Zena Workman Your question indicates that your fifth great-grandmother Lucy Briant (also known as Lucy Rebecca Au…
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Black in the USSR: 3 Generations of a Russian Family
In 1932, the poet Langston Hughes spent Christmas in the “dusty, coloured, cotton-growing South” of Uzbekistan, then one of the Soviet Union’s Asian republics. Hughes had been in Moscow, working on a film critical of American race relations, but the project was abandoned, in part because the Soviets were then seeking official diplomatic recognition and improved…
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Were My NC Ancestors Afro-Latino Immigrants?
I am trying to confirm whether my free-person-of-color ancestors in and around Northampton County, N.C., emigrated there from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic around 1800. Of particular interest are what I believe to be familial ties to the well-respected Robertses of Northampton County. It appears that my maternal line descends from John Roberts, born…
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Do Mormon Genealogy Records Include Black People?
I am trying to learn more about my family’s history. My mother, Ora Lean Johnson, is from Alexandria or Shreveport, La. However, she is ill and unable to provide me with any information. My father is Emanuel Christopher Bass Sr. of West Virginia, and as far as I know, he is still living. He was…