Sometimes when I want to feel like I’m really doing something, but don’t actually have the time, mental energy, or focus to actually do the thing, I buy books about the thing. How many of you all do that, too? It's not the worst habit in the world - I still feel connected to whatever the thing is (genealogy - it's genealogy, y'all), and since I’m often buying reference material, when I’m ready to dig into a topic, I already have some of the resources I need.
All of this to say, I bought some genealogy books in 2023. I controlled myself, I promise. I’m already running out of space on my bookshelves – books stacked on top of books in front of the neatly shelved ones. And I actually did a fair amount of genealogical work this year – I just didn’t do a lot of blogging. (Here are some of the things I’m up to when I’m not posting.)
I already posted about the books I purchased earlier this
year on the topic of Rosenwald schools – schools for Black children across the
south that were funded by Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald - because of
research I’m doing into two teachers on my mom’s side of the family, Lula
(Scott) Crew and her daughter Beuna Nell Crew. So today I’ll just share with
you my other genealogy purchases from 2023. Some are meant for spot-searching,
some are meant for reading from start to finish, and I haven’t read/searched
them all, but my quick peeks in all of them make me happy to have them on my
shelves.
Without further ado, here are my genealogy bookshelf additions
from 2023:
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, by Tiya Miles.
I love both family history stories and stories about the
lives of objects that travel through families, even when the families and
objects are not my own. This book, about a cotton sack that connected three Black
women across multiple generations of slavery and freedom, has been the talk of
the Black history world for a while, and even won a National Book Award. It has
been recommended to me by multiple people, and I will for sure be reading it
before the end of the new year.
The Best of Reclaiming Kin: Helpful Tips on Researching Your Roots, by Robyn N. Smith.
I’ve been reading Robyn Smith’s blog, Reclaiming Kin, off
and on for years. I appreciate how she teaches you how to solve genealogical
problems and shares historical content and context using her own family members
and their stories as examples. I’d be lying if I said she wasn’t one of the
inspirations for my own blog. Her book is just shy of a decade old at this
point – and the blog posts even older – but when I wanted to expand my
collection of “how to” books, and, in particular, add another one by a Black
author to my collection, I knew this is the one I wanted to grab. Because it’s
a book of blog posts, each entry is short and sweet (Narrator: she says not
without irony) and I can dip in and out easily. But since it’s a book and not a
blog, I can mark it up as much as I want and give myself a break from screens
while I’m at it!
Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960, by Rebecca Sharpless.
My family roots stretch back to Georgia, Alabama, and South
Carolina, and it doesn’t take much work to find a female ancestor, direct or
collateral, who was working as a domestic. They provided hard labor as
housekeepers, chefs, childcare providers, and more, and then returned to their
own homes to do the same. I majored in African American Studies with a focus on
Women and Families, so I’m not unfamiliar with the broad (and some more
specific) strokes of these stories, but this book was published after I
graduated and I’m interested in seeing what the author has to share.
Five Hundred Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936, by Aaron Spencer Fogleman and Robert Hanserd.
If I had all the time and money in the world to turn over
every stone in my genealogical research, I would. If there’s a resource out
there that might connect to my family, I want to find it and read it. This book
speaks to that urge. Maybe one of my enslaved or formerly enslaved ancestors
wrote about their experiences, and this book – which was just published in 2022
– is the first to include a reference to their work? Had to buy it! Bonus: it might
also make me aware of sources that will be useful for my job.
Guide to African American and African Primary Sources at Harvard University, by Barbara A. Burg, Richard Newman, and Elizabeth E. Sandager.
When I’m starting a new research project, one of my favorite places to look for references is my copy of the Harvard Guide to African American History, which is a giant, and very useful, bibliography of sources, organized by themes and time periods. They’re not all things written by researchers at Harvard or based only off of Harvard’s sources – it’s just a helpful list that faculty and staff of Harvard’s Department of African and African American Studies and Hutchins Center for African & African American Research compiled.
But, colleges and universities do have amazing – and often
little known – collections. So, when I felt the urge to scratch my genealogy
research itch through books, I grabbed a copy of this one, on Harvard’s African
American and African primary sources. There are oral histories; letters from
Black artists and intellectuals; organizational records from Black businesses, community
organizations, and religious communities; and records of the federal government,
including the FBI. There are materials from across Africa and the US, and the
collection spans at least 3 centuries. It’s amazing. My copy was published in
2000, so honestly, who knows what else they’ve collected since, but this is a
great starting point!
Index to Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations: Locations, Plantations, Surnames and Collections, by Jean L. Cooper.
I’m descended from enslaved people on both sides of my
family. To better understand their stories, I am going to have to identify and
then dig into the lives of the people who kept them enslaved. That’s where this
book comes in. There is a set of microfilm records called Records of
Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution Through the Civil War,
which pulls together primary source records from several research libraries from
across the South. There are just under 1600 reels of film in the record set,
and each reel has around 1,000 pages of documents. Between the size and scope
of the microfilmed record set itself, the geographic spread of the libraries
that contain the original documents, and the previous lack of a unified,
multi-purpose index, these records weren’t necessarily easy for genealogists or
historians to use.
But in this book, Jean L. Cooper has provided an index of
the records arranged by location (state and then parish, county, or city),
plantation or farm name, surnames, and official collection title. The index
then points you toward the actual part of the collection in which you will find
the primary sources you want to examine. I have already started marking off
collections I want to explore!
* * *
So, there you have it, (most of) the genealogy books I purchased this year. What books did you buy and/or read this year for your family history research? Please share in the comments below!
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