Wednesday, July 23, 2003
IN THE SPOTLIGHT:Barnetta McGhee White
The July SPOTLIGHT shines on Dr. Barnetta McGhee White, educator, writer, and speaker.After Barnetta White retired from her career as a professor in the School of Education at North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina, she presented many workshops and lectures about writing family histories for posterity. She always started each lecture by emphasizing to the audience the need to interview their oldest living relative and to use the clues garnered from them as a beginning point in that family's history. "It finally occurred to me", she says, "that I needed to follow my own advice and put something down in writing for future generations to see". This realization led her to a hobby which rapidly became an avocation: that of locating, translating, and transcribing original legal documents, primarily from the 19th century, in order to discover her own family history as well as that of others.
Posted by Webguru on 7/23/03 at 5:53 am EST
Saturday, July 05, 2003
Art Thomas Presents Paper at KY Gathering
Art Thomas traveled back to the 18th century during the weekend of June 28-29. Art and his wife traveled to Kentucky to a Revolutionary War reenactment and 2003 Gathering of the Ruddle's and Martin's Stations Historic Association. The association commemorates the Ruddle's and Martin's Forts settlements which were taken by the British expeditionary force on June 24, 1780.
Art presented a paper on his African American ancestors who were among the 470 men, women and children killed or captured in the raid. The full text of Grandma Reno's Story below can be found in the AfriGeneas Library.
GRANDMA RENO’S STORY Grandma Rachel Reno’s (pronounced Reyno) mother, a slave girl named Candis, was captured in an Indian raid in Kentucky along with two daughters of the slavemaster and taken to Canada.
This piece of oral family legend had been passed through generations of Grandma Reno’s descendants throughout the central mid-western counties of Champaign, Clark. Logan, Miami and Clark in Ohio since the mid 1800’s.
The descendant surnames are many, as Grandma Reno had 16 children, 14 of whom made adulthood.
One of the 16, a daughter named Susannah, born in Canada between 1795-1800, married Lewis Adams, a Free Person of Color, 1 Jan 1816 in Urbana, Champaign County, Ohio. Lewis and Susannah became my great-great-great grandparents, their son William F. Adams born 7 Jan 1818, in Urbana, Ohio and his wife Lydia Ann Edwards born 19 Sep 1817 in Harrisburg, Dauphin County, PA, became my great-great-grandparents.
Posted by Webguru on 7/05/03 at 4:12 pm EST