Father's Day and Juneteenth special StoryCorps interview

 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5861558

Above is a link for a poignant interview from NPR's Story Corps with Makeda Peterson, whose father started not only the Juneteenth celebration in Kansas City, but also started the Black Archives of Mid-America with objects and documents that he started collecting as a young man. Horace Peterson tragically died in a drowning accident while saving his son from drowning, but his legacy lives on, since his widow, Barbara, and daughter Makeda, have really built up the Kansas City area's Juneteenth celebration. 

And an interesting note about the whole point of Juneteenth - the Emancipation Proclamation was issued 1 Jan 1863, so why were people in the Galveston TX area still enslaved in June 1865, over two years later? The Proclamation only applied to areas controlled by the Confederate army, but of course, those areas were almost by definition places where the forces in power wanted to maintain slavery - so the Emancipation Proclamation was kind of a ruse... just another example of why it's important to look in detail, that things are more complicated than a soundbite, and that we should all try to understand history in order to understand how we got to where we are today. OK - off my soapbox now! Happy Juneteenth and Father's Day! 

Happy Pride Month! Resources for genealogy research about our LGBTQI ancestors

 Well, it's Pride Month in the US (in lots of other countries, it's in August). The National Genealogical Society has a great blog post about resources for researching our ancestors who did not conform to gender or sexual orientation norms, and therefore were often under-represented or hidden in records.  Here is their post, with a great list of resources to get started or to deepen research. Even just familiarizing ourselves with these can raise awareness of when we might be coming across someone in a family tree whom we would today consider LGBTQI. Watch out in records, obituaries, etc for coded language about non-hetero relationships, and for alternate names that someone might have used to camouflage or protect themselves from community or family ostracism.

"A Family Secret No More" - Susan Saulny

Here is an article recently published about a woman who discovered a family secret that went back 3 generations about "passing" - spurred by her reading of the new Pope Leo about a year ago, and comments about his genealogy including that his black/ Creole ancestors in New Orleans left by train and settled in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. This struck a chord with her and she realized that was what had happened to her long-lost great-uncle Edward DeGrange, explaining why she didn't know about him/ why he was never discussed by her family in New Orleans. 

So many families have secrets like this - sometimes across a "color line," and sometimes the dividing element is religion or language, a hidden sexual / gender orientation or birth outside of marriage... this is not to sensationalize but to normalize that we all have unknown stories in our families... I have found some in my own family. Recovering and trying to reconstruct what happened is a way to honor the struggles and sorrows that our ancestors endured, and to reflect on how we can change the way we react to unexpected family events or developments. Happy reading!