TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF A BLACK GENEALOGIST

STUDIES OF THE PRESIDENCY

2010-09-17T14:50:00.001-07:00

TEXAS CENSUS REPORTS FOR STUDENTS MANDATORY

2010-05-11T22:44:00.000-07:00

Texas School Demands Students Submit Intrusive Census Form

Infowars.com

May 11, 2010

An Infowars.com reader has sent an email with an attached scan of a “State of Texas Census Report” distributed to students.

The 7th grader who received the form was promised an “A” if he completed it. In addition, students were subjected to “a pep talk on how it is their duty as American Citizens to complete” the census form and submit to the school and presumably Texas authorities.

•“Sound pretty nosy, doesn’t it?” a paragraph at the bottom of the form states. “But a census is very important. The information is used for all kinds of purposes, including setting budgets, zoning land, determining how many schools to build, and much more. The census helps Texas leaders plan for the future needs of its citizens. Hey, that’s you!”

The U.S. Census — to say nothing of school districts in Texas or anywhere else in the country — does not have constitutional authority to ask the sort of questions included in the form below. The Constitution calls for a simple enumeration every ten years in order to apportion the number of seats in the House of Representatives. Period.

“Unless a census taker can show me a constitutional requirement, the only information I plan to give are the number and names of the people in my household,” Walter E. Williams wrote in February. Williams quotes Thomas Jefferson: “Whensoever the General Government (Washington) assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”

The same applies to Texas or any other state that insists it has a right to be nosy, as the form below admits.

It is especially pernicious when the government attempts to brainwash children into the belief that the government has the authority to demand personal and private information from citizens.

Not only do parents need to tell the state to stop inculcating their children, they also need to if possible pull their children out of public schools that have become centers of indoctrination in worship of the state.

THE VERNON COUNTY, MISSOURI CEMETERY DIRECTORY IS HERE !!

2010-05-05T22:37:00.000-07:00

Nancy Thompson, Neoma Foreman and at least 30 volunteers from the Tri-County Genealogical Society contributed thousands of hours over the past six years to get this tome completed. The work is published by the Vernon county Historical Society.

Days were spent trudging through muddy or dusty cemeteries, fighting flies, mosquitoes, spiders and snakes to discover every tombstone.

Some stones were resurrected from beneath the sod. Some graves were discovered that had no stones at all.

This two volume set has more than 700 pages of burial listings. The index includes maiden names for the women (when known) and adds more than 200 pages of information to the first volume.

You can get copies of the book by contacting the Tri-County Genealogy Society at their website, or drop in at the Bushwhacker Museum where the Vernon County Historical Society has some available for sale.

CENSUS WORKERS DENIED JOBS BECAUSE OF JAIL RECORD

2010-05-04T21:00:00.000-07:00

We Can’t Tell You Why The Census Bureau is hiring a million or more people to assist with the 2010 count. It is temporary work, but it pays well. With national unemployment at nearly 10 percent, it looks like an excellent opportunity. That is unless you are one of the nearly 50 million Americans with any arrest or conviction on record.

A new class-action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of applicants who say they were unfairly turned down for census jobs based on an opaque screening policy that relies on F.B.I. checks for any criminal histories. Those checks are notoriously unreliable. A 2006 federal report found that half of them were inaccurate or out of date.

The Census Bureau is vague about what makes someone ineligible. In Congressional testimony, it suggested that it is excluding people who have been convicted of crimes involving violence and dishonesty. The bureau’s Web site seems to say that applicants whose background checks turn up any arrest — no matter how trivial, distant in time, irrelevant to the job — receive a letter advising them that they can remain eligible only if they produce “official court documentation” bearing on the case within 30 days. Incredibly, the letter does not identify the alleged criminal activity. Applicants must prove eligibility, even if they don’t know why they were flagged.

Official court records are often unobtainable for the millions of people whose convictions have been sealed or expunged or for people who have been arrested and released because of lack of evidence or mistaken arrest. This problem falls heaviest on black and Hispanic communities where stop-and-frisk policies and indiscriminate arrests are common.

The hiring problem is not limited to the Census Bureau. After 9/11, Congress required port workers to undergo F.B.I. background checks to keep their jobs. Last year, a study by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for workers, found that the government had mistakenly denied credentials to tens of thousands of those workers.

States and cities are wisely revising employment policies. The federal government needs to develop a fair and transparent screening system for job applicants and a more effective appeals process. Congress must also require the F.B.I. to verify the criminal records — and find missing data before issuing background checks.

FACE TO FACE WITH THE 'LOST' 85 DIGGERS OF FROMELLES

2010-05-04T20:46:00.000-07:00

He calls her Marples and she affectionately refers to him as Sherlock. He's a determined, quiet cop with a forensic background; she's a chatty grandmother with degrees in social research and 30 years' genealogy experience.

They live vastly different lives but West Australian Sandra Playle and Victorian Tim Lycett are united by a singular passion: to give identities to the men buried in the shadow of Fromelles' tiny Pheasant Wood. These men, even boys, died on July 19-20, 1916, in what the Australian War Memorial calls Australia's ''worst 24 hours''. In a battle intended in part as a diversion to the Battle of the Somme, 80 kilometres to the south, Australians saw their first action on the Western Front; 5533 of them were killed, wounded or captured.

Playle and Lycett have spent two years hunched over computers, slogging through papers, microfiche, tromping in rural cemeteries and poring over photos of headstones in a bid to build family trees for the 191 men whose bodies are believed to be those buried in eight mass graves dug by the Germans in a field below the Fromelles church.

Now they believe they have the paperwork to prove that another four men are probably buried in those pits but have yet to be added to the official working list.

Like Lambis Englezos, the Victorian school teacher who doggedly argued to have the Pheasant Wood graves officially investigated, it has been so-called ''amateurs'' like Playle and Lycett who have sifted through service records and military papers not only to find living relatives and descendants but in some cases to alert them to a relationship with a missing soldier they may not have known.

In Britain, two fellow ''amateurs'' - London lawyer Melvyn Pack and historian-researcher Victoria Burbidge - have also rigorously checked what remains of the British records and have locked horns with the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre over the accuracy of the British working list. They are attempting to force the removal of 23 British names after proving that the men were not in the 61st Division - the only British division in that battle - and therefore nowhere near Fromelles at the time of their deaths. They have also argued for the addition of one new name which should be on the list, but isn't.

The professional link, however, is Peter Barton, the esteemed British historian whose work in the Bavarian archives located the crucial records needed to show that the Germans had interred Australian and British men in the pits by Pheasant Wood.

His 600-page report as the Fromelles Project historian in 2007 secured Australian approval and British financial support and launched the formal archaeological investigation to prove Englezos's theory.

"This is the single most significant battlefield find of human remains since searches ceased in 1921,'' says Barton. ''The way the project has been carried out sets a precedent for any future project … if someone produced a dossier as persuasive or even more persuasive than the Pheasant Wood case, it is difficult to see how the Commonwealth War Graves Commission or government authorities could turn down a request to investigate."

For Lycett, it was a chance meeting with Englezos that fired up the history sleuth in him. Passionate about World War I, he had embarked on the Fromelles descendants' project when he decided to take leave without pay from the Victorian police force. With time on his hands, he offered his services:

"It dawned on me that someone was going to have to find the descendants," he says. "Obviously, Defence were going to ask for relatives to come forward as well as use the media, but not everyone knows they are related so if someone could actually start on pulling the information together."

Lycett had made contact with Playle via the Great War Forum, an internet site for historians and military buffs. An experienced genealogist, she was already well into a project to photograph and document war graves in the south-west of Western Australia. With Major General Mike O'Brien's imprimatur, they began to work through the men on the working list provided by CWGC.

"As we worked through the list in the beginning, we realised that we had a talent to work together,'' says Playle.

"He is a policeman, he knows how to talk to people, whereas I can't deal with family where an old man is crying on the telephone. But Tim knows what questions to ask, how to pinpoint facts. That became his role while mine is the genealogical and records access research skills."

Slowly, meticulously, they examined each man's service record, finding next of kin, cross-checking with birth records, marriage registers, death notices of family and photographic records of headstones. They had thousands of pieces of a 93-year-old jigsaw. They began to put it together.

In one case, they managed to put together the history of Jack Joyce, an older man who was born illegitimately. Little is known of any surviving family. They found the only known photograph of him, kept fondly by a nurse sweetheart who was denied his medals because she wasn't a relative. The medals are unissued to this day.

Robert Courtney Green was found to have surviving descendants and an identification tag apparently bearing dried blood, a potential DNA source. (see story below)

But the real eureka moment was Lesley Leister: "It took months,'' says Playle. ''We had nothing but an adoptive name as a starting reference and still we uncovered the truth about his illegitimate birth, identified his true parentage, established his birth name and located his descendants. Oh, we did a little jig with that one!"

Playle says the researchers were not prepared for the effect these stories had on them. ''They have become far more than just names," she says.

Cross-matching paperwork with cemetery records and information on headstones has been a critical theme of the research. James Gordon was 15 - apparently the youngest Australian killed in action. "This boy had no living descendants … Such is life," says Playle.

Barton warns no archival research can provide a battle's definitive picture. "Until I visited the archives in Munich, we had only looked at the battle through the prism of the Commonwealth archives. In fact it was the German resource that gave us a completely different narrative and different account and contained far more than anybody ever expected. This body of work has been added to by visits to the Ingolstadt, the Bavarian army museum, and hugely augmented by the International Red Cross archives in Geneva."

The Australians say there are 191 names on the Australian working list and the DNA specialists have suggested that if 30 can be identified that would be a good result. Says Lycett: "They have all these experts, anthropologists, archaeologists, DNA experts. But they are missing a cog in the wheel without genealogists. They are simply relying on requests to families to provide details and while a proportion of them will have correct information, we know a couple at least that are not correct and many others who don't have a knowledge of their family history at all."

CENSUS BUREAU URGING SAME-SEX COUPLES TO FILL OUT CENSUS FORMS

2010-04-05T23:17:00.000-07:00

With strong backing from the Census Bureau, gay-rights activists are urging maximum participation by their community in the first U.S. census that will tally same-sex couples who say they're married — even those without a marriage license.

The move has drawn fire from conservatives, who complain that it's another step toward redefining marriage.

For the first time, the bureau has deployed a team of professional field workers — about two-dozen strong — to reach out to gays and lesbians. On Monday, the bureau unveiled its first public-service videos encouraging gay Americans to mail in their census forms

HISTORIC TRIALS GO ONLINE IN THE UK

2010-04-05T15:35:00.000-07:00

Great tools for researchers

SCAMS AGAINST GRANDPARENTS

2010-04-01T19:40:00.000-07:00

Beware of calls from young people claiming to be your grandchildren asking for money.

RESEARCH AND ORGANIZE YOUR FAMILY TREE

2010-04-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

This might be a useful tool for genealogists

WHY IS THE CENSUS BUREAU SO REDUNDANT ??

2010-03-22T20:34:00.000-07:00

In 2009 the Census Bureau sent me a large packet to complete for the 2010 census. Now I have gotten another form from the bureau to fill out and three follow-up letters. Since this Census has been taken over by the current administration, the reasoning behind that was they could do it better. I think it is worse because I am being slammed with all these repeated forms to fill out.

PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA AND SCOTT BROWN ARE RELATED

2010-03-10T20:38:00.000-08:00

President Barak Obama has a unlikely long lost cousin : Scott Brown, the Republican state senator from Mass .who won the senate seat long held by the late senator Edward Kennedy.

The President and the Senator-Elect are 10TH cousins, according to the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

ANCESTRY.COM RAISES $100 MILLION IN IPO

2010-03-10T20:22:00.000-08:00

Genealogy Web site Ancestry.Com has succeded in raising $100 million in it's initial public offering. With more than a million paying subscribers, little competition, a small debt load and a record of increasing revenue, it is fared better than IPO'S that recently priced below their filing ranges.

The Provo, Utah - based company, which is the world's largest online resource for birth certificates and marriage records.

BLACKS ARE URGING THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO IMPROVE THE CENSUS COUNT

2010-01-13T23:11:00.000-08:00

The census this year is a high stakes census. The census has historically overlooked millions in the Black community. Black groups are pleading with the Obama Administration to improve the count. They met with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to voice their concerns.

They felt that the Census Bureau has not done enough to ensure an accurate count .About 3 million Blacks were missed in 2000, while many Whites were over counted. The groups are calling for expansion of paid advertising in cities that have a large percentage of hard-to-count Blacks .

They want a change of prisoners ,who are tallied in the county of the incarceration instead of their home residence. The headcount by the census will be done by mail and door-to-door canvassing this spring. The population figures are used to apportion House seats and distribute nearly $450 billion in federal aid.

NEW LAW IN CALIFORNIA COULD AFFECT GENEALOGISTS

2009-07-01T22:21:00.001-07:00

This law restricts information on marriage records. With an increase in indenity theft, many genealogists will be left out in the cold.

http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/07/california-considers-restrictive-marriage-records-access.html

2009 ANNUAL CENSUS

2009-02-23T17:33:00.000-08:00

The Board of Registrars is mailing the 2009 annual census forms to every household in the towns and cities all across the U.S. A yearly census is mandated by the state and must be returned in the envelope provided within 10 days. All information must be completed. The census forms must be signed, dated, and returned even if no changes have occurred in the household.

The census is needed to obtain an accurate population count and street listing; the information collected is important for school enrollment planning, senior citizen needs and veterans benefits. In addition, the population information is a factor in determining the amount of state aid received by the town.

IS THE CENSUS AS WE KNOW IT GOING TO DISAPPEAR !

2009-02-19T15:48:00.000-08:00

The Republicans are afraid that re-districting will occur and they may lose some congressional seats. I think the Red and Blue states will disappear. There will be a Democratic majority in every state. I hope that the census keeps to it's original intent.

The NYT reports today that Republicans are furious over Senator Judd Gregg's withdrawal as President Obama's pick for Commerce Secretary, because they believe it signals that the White House intends to "politicize" the 2010 census.

The concern in part relates to sampling, the statistical technique that extrapolates numbers based on actual door-to-door counts and knowledge of uncounted individuals, mostly the poor and racial and ethnic minorities (and mostly Democratic voters). But the Supreme Court ruled that sampling--at least as the basis for Congressional districting--violated the Census Act (Sec. 195) in the 1999 case Department of Commerce v. United States House. So the concern about "politicizing" the Census must be based on some other concern.

GENEALOGY WEB SITE ADDS SLAVE MANIFESTS, LETTERS

2009-02-13T17:53:00.000-08:00

Genealogy Web site adds slave manifests, letters

By Janet McConnaughey • The Associated Press • February 13, 2009

http://www.shreveporttimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?

NEW ORLEANS — Records of more than 30,000 slaves shipped to New Orleans, copies of more than 20,000 letters to and from Abraham Lincoln and records of 4.2 million Civil War soldiers are going online for the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth.

Most will be available only to Ancestry.com’s 925,000 paying subscribers. But the Lincoln letters and speeches, provided by the Library of Congress, will be free.

An index of the slave manifests also will be free once volunteers have created it from the scanned images being added to the site Thursday, said Gary Gibb, vice president for content for the family of sites.

That will be extremely valuable to historians and people interested in their family history, said Christopher Harter, director of library and reference services at Amistad Research Center, Tulane University’s black history archive. “It’s one thing to digitize and put the image up on the Web. But it’s of far greater value to have the information transcribed and searchable by those who are doing the research.”The manifests from 1810 through 1860 “document the movement of slaves from the mid-Atlantic states to the Deep South because of the cotton gin and the need for millions of slaves to work the cotton fields,” said Lisa Arnold, Ancestry.com’s expert in black genealogy. There are three documents for each ship, including the shipmaster’s signed statement that he is not importing slaves — a practice Congress banned in 1808. “He’s putting his name on the line that he’s not importing them, simply shipping them from one port in the United States to another,” Arnold said. Because the number on each ship varied, she didn’t know exactly how many slaves were involved but estimated the number to be 30,000 to 50,000. The other documents also should be interesting to scholars and history buffs, Harter said. The database of Civil War soldier profiles — including 17,000 photographs — was created by “a Civil War buff who has been collecting that kind of thing for years,” company spokesman Mike Ward said. In addition, the site is adding a collection of requests for presidential pardons from more than 15,000 former Confederate soldiers and government officials and applications from 60,000 Confederate soldiers or their widows for pensions from the state of Georgia. That state has some Confederate pension records available on its Web site. Ancestry.com is providing a complete digital collection to the Georgia state archives, Ward said. Georgia should have those records on the Web within weeks, said Anne Smith, spokeswoman for the Georgia secretary of state’s office.

WITH 2010 CENSUS LOOMING, MASS FEARS THERE WILL BE AN UNDERCOUNT

2009-01-22T22:44:00.000-08:00

Because of immigration raids, officials and organizers are worried that doors will not open for census takers. That scenario could cost Massachusetts millions of federal dollars and maybe a congressional seat. Authorities are stepping up efforts to reach immigrants and other hard-to count-groups.

AFRICAN AMERICAN OBITUARIES

2008-12-31T22:23:00.000-08:00

There are hundreds of African American obituaries on-line in the AfriGeneas Database. I have put over a thousand obits also on the Findagrave website. The websites are a godsend to Black genealogists. I have found a few relatives on those sites. AfriGeneas is a valuable site for african Americans.

DO YOU HAVE INDIAN ANCESTRY? COUNTY KEPT NO RECORDS

2008-12-31T22:06:00.000-08:00

I found out my grandmother was half Blackfeet Indian and I contacted the Arkansas Historical Commission in my state. They told me that they had no records of Indians in our state.I am lucky that I have a picture of my whole family in their indian costumes.

In the state of Arkansas after the Civil War, all free Black men were ordered to leave the state. So I have stopped working so hard on my line because I know that my state had no regard of Black History.

Last month I contacted the Counway County Arkansas Courthouse and wanted the records of "Sullivan"the black high school. I was told that there were no records. They didn't keep them. But the other high school in the town, their records are there.

DO YOU KNOW WHO YOUR GRANDPARENTS ARE?

2008-12-31T21:53:00.000-08:00

I have talked to many people who do do not know who their grandparents are. Their parents never discussed it with them. I was so surprised. I had never heard of such a thing. Family and family values are lost with many families now. Trying to make a living has been at the forefront.

On holidays in California there are people who do not take the time to relax and spend time with family. They are out shopping at malls and home improvement stores. And some of them don't know the meaning of the holiday and why it is observed. It is just a day off work.

MAKE SURE YOU ARE SEARCHING THE RIGHT STATE

2008-12-31T21:44:00.000-08:00

I had been searching the whole state of Arkansas for years and never could find anything. I was introduced to a cousin whose mother was a slave. She told me that the family was from Darlington, South Carolina. After that it was a little easier.

But I could never find my two great grandfather's parents or if they had any siblings. I could not find them on the 1870 census.

LOOKING FOR BLACK "CLEMONS,CLEMMONS " RESEARCHERS

2008-02-12T00:40:00.000-08:00

Looking for black researchers looking for Clemons, Clemmons surnames. My ancestor was WILLIAM CLEMONS b. 1855 in Darlington, South Carolina. He was married to HELEN BROCKINGTON.

LOOKING FOR BLACK " BROCKINGTON " RESEARCHERS

2008-02-12T00:30:00.000-08:00

Looking for all Black Brockington researchers. I have been searching for thirty years and have not advanced too far. I am researching the areas of Darlington South Carolina, Morrilton Arkansas and Kansas City Missouri. Also the Baltimore area.