Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
In search of answers
Genealogy is a hot topic at Fayetteville library
“America has become a nation obsessed with genealogy. The mere existence of so many genealogical materials digitized, indexed, and searchable online, and our communal drive to find them, comes from a suite of personal and cultural motivations, as well as a complex history around the search for lineage.”
— From “The Lost Family” by Libby Copeland
“We look because human beings are natural born storytellers, and we want to know how our ‘once upon a time’ fits into the narratives of our lives. We look because genealogy has a way of making abstract history real, and we want to know if the past has guidance for us — hapless denizens of a chaotic present whose future we can’t yet see.”
— Libby Copeland, writing in Psychology Today
National Family History Month is October, but the designation of February as Black History Month was one of the reasons the Fayetteville Public Library decided to host a series of genealogy workshops. The first, on Feb. 12, looked at “Black American Genealogy” and offered ways FPL can help with an African American’s search. The second offering, four seminars by Judy G. Russell, the “Legal Genealogist,” will take place Feb. 26 online.
Amy Nelson Lamont, an FPL genealogy librarian, says she loves getting to help someone have a “Eureka moment.”
“People who research their family history honor their ancestors but also get a better understanding of themselves as well,” she says, and those seekers come from “all walks of life.” A typical day includes questions ranging from “How do I use Ancestry. com?” to “Who originally owned the property where I now live?” to “I have a tombstone in my yard that reads … Can you tell me anything about it?,” which she calls the craziest question in her more than a decade with FPL.
Lamont says the library has “diligently been trying to broaden our collection to serve as a onestop establishment. People who come here typically have massive research requirements for very limited amounts of time.
“We have been working hard on getting the more elusive materials of ethnic heritages. I will admit, there are quite a few trying to trace down their Native heritage,” she goes on. “We have people come from other towns, states and countries to do research in the Grace Keith Genealogy Collection. Often the Cherokee Heritage Center in Tahlequah [Okla.] sends people over here because we have more resources than they do. It makes me so proud!”
Lamont adds that the genealogy library has recently added four new sections: Black Americans, American Slaves, Freedmen and Black Native Americans.
“[It’s] still very challenging but not always impossible” for African-American and Indigenous descendants to find out more about their ancestors, she says. “There are more methods coming to light: books, TEDtalks, TV shows, podcasts — it is quite amazing what is available now in comparison to the old message boards and written letters to historical societies.” Nevertheless, she adds, those traditional methods should not be discounted.
Among Russell’s sessions Feb. 26 is “Deemed a Runaway,” her talk about how the Black laws of the north help to offer some good research materials for those who have so few, Lamont says. “We thought this would be a good time to showcase our collection and bring attention to such an amazing opportunity!”
Russell, a Colorado native with roots deep in the American South on her mother’s side and entirely in Germany on her father’s side, says her interest in genealogy was born “around summer campfires at my grandparents’ farm in Virginia, listening to the stories told as only the Scots-Irish can tell them: with an utter and total unwillingness to ever let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
“I finally got interested in seeing if there was any truth in the stories,” she says, “and that was all it took. I’ve been hooked on family history ever since. And yes, there was some truth to some of the stories — but none at all in others!
“I can’t say I was surprised to find there wasn’t a whole lot of truth in those campfire stories, but I was surprised to find that my mother’s family has been in America since before there was an America — some branches arriving in southern Maryland and northern Virginia in the 1600s,” Russell explains. “Looking at my mother’s entries in my sister’s baby book, I expected to find that there were immigrants after the Civil War. But all of her ancestors were here very early, and I have ancestors who were in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
“I was also shocked to find that my German-born father had living relatives in the United States — a fair number of folks I’d never heard of. And then of course there is that second great-grandfather who was indicted by the Republic of Texas … for bigamy!”
Russell holds a bachelor’s degree from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and a law degree from Rutgers School of Law-Newark. Before she retired, she worked as a newspaper reporter, trade association writer, legal investigator, defense attorney, federal prosecutor, law editor and, for more than 20 years, as an adjunct member of the faculty at Rutgers Law School. Now, she “writes, teaches and lectures on a wide variety of genealogical topics, providing expert guidance through the murky territory where law and family history intersect.” Her topics at FPL will be:
• No Vitals? No Problem! —
Building a Family through Circumstantial Evidence, 9 a.m. Feb. 26.
“One of our big challenges in family history is tracing women who married before the 1850 census — the first census where they were listed by name,” Russell explains. “It’s even harder when there are no birth, marriage or death records for our research subject. This is a look at just such a case: tracing a woman who died in Texas in 1908 back to her family in Mississippi, where there are no existing vital records for her at all.”
• After the Courthouse Burns: Rekindling Family History through DNA, 10:30 a.m. Feb. 26.
“Particularly for researchers in the U.S. South, research often runs into catastrophic records loss,” she says. “When a disaster takes out birth, marriage, death, court, land and probate records all in one fell swoop, it may still be possible to light our family’s research fires — to rekindle our interest in our ancestral roots — using DNA evidence.”
• Deemed a Runaway — Black Laws of the North, 1 p.m. Feb. 26.
“Slavery’s force was felt far north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and the Black laws of northern states created valuable records for tracing African-American families,” she says. “Here, we’ll examine those northern laws and the records that can be uniquely rewarding for descendants of the enslaved and the enslavers alike.”
• And Where There Is — or Isn’t — a Will, 2:30 p.m. Feb. 26.
“Probate records are juicy sources of details about our ancestors, and understanding the probate process and how to find the records can help us break through brick walls in our research,” she says.
Asked the biggest secret to successful genealogy research, Russell has a simple, one-word answer: “Persistence.”
“Seriously. It’s easy to get frustrated and give up. But persistence — coming back to a question time and again from a different perspective or when new or different records become available — will often get us the answer we need.”