Black History Month: Celebrating Diverse Voices

welcome to family search live this is a special edition my name is jonathan gustafson i'm a product manager i'm here with two excellent uh folks from family search uh kayla and kayla and uh tom uh good friends and you can see wendy's uh picture here she's giving us the opportunity for us three to speak today because we are here to talk about black history month one of the awesomest best months of the of the year super excited uh let's just take a few minutes if you would uh kayla do you mind just introducing yourself briefly your role a little bit about yourself yes so i am a marketing coordinator here at family search i work really closely with the african heritage team i joined family search in 2017 first as an intern and then as a full-time employee i'm living in salt lake city but i'm originally from washington dc so the maryland side of the dc area awesome and tom um can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role as well well kayla had a great boss when she first started tom was my boss and he was great it's true it's very true we had a good time but uh tom reid uh my title is deputy chief genealogical officer i know that's a mouthful but basically i'm responsible for our outreach and connection with the professional genealogical community and with societies and various groups that focus on people of african descent so i'm part of the african heritage team this is kayla as you are jonathan um i've been with family search for seven years it's been a great seven years done lots of awesome fun stuff originally grew up in a town next to you jonathan and absolutely grew up in normal illinois now we're we've got the band back together again but live in south jordan utah so just a suburb of salt lake city and unfortunately not in the family history library although my virtual background is from the from the family history library but we'll talk about like what things people can access from the family history library even though we're not open fully to patrons and things like that right now but um just happy to be here and happy to be celebrating black history month with y'all awesome awesome just to say a few personal things about myself and then kayla i want to ask you for you as well so i've been at family search about a year and a half i am an experience manager or product manager uh with the african heritage segment i got so for me that's the privilege of of uh working on genealogy in africa and in the caribbean and the united states for anybody descended from africa it's just like it's just a dream position uh for me i love it um just on a personal level i've got you know a couple kids and um one's uh already almost uh an adult surprisingly which is the weirdest thing in the world uh anyway so enough about me uh kayla so how did you super curious right how did you make this journey to like being interested in genealogy what brought you personally to genealogy so it's interesting really my first big exposure was joining family search and i came to family search not with the intention to be a genealogist i still would not consider myself a genealogist but i had a really um big desire to understand my identity and i think a lot of us do you know i i specifically i'm biracial my dad is black and my mom is white and so i've just in in my life growing up have been trying to figure out where do i fit and one of the things that i noticed was family history does a wonderful job in helping you understand who you are by looking to your past and connecting to your ancestors and learning of their stories and so that's one of the reasons i love working at family search is it's it's so much more although so important than names dates and records it's these stories that can bring strength and resiliency to you that's why you go through your life yeah that's awesome so let me ask tom on this kayla was mentioning stories i love that is is there an experience that that you've learned about maybe from a parents or relative or any any of your your predecessors a family story that that gives you strength that that boys you up um or just any cool family story about uh your family well so the one thing is my you know i although i wish i could trace my lineage back to africa i'm still stuck in mississippi in alabama that's uh you know that's where my grandfather was born actually in morango county alabama which is kind of rural alabama and uh you know i i've been kind of tracing his lineage i found my great grandfather but i'm kind of at a dead end there and and so i actually had this cool experience i think i might have shared before where i actually went down he my my great grandfather ed reed married a woman by the name of arlivia pruitt and there is a pruitt cemetery in marango county near this little town of hoboken and between nicholsville and it's on a google map and all it is is a pin and a year and a half ago i went down to alabama to try and find this cemetery oh and how how was that you went down to see it how was that that's amazing it was crazy i it was hot i had to i had to get it it was it's now you know the land is owned by a lumber company and so i actually had to go on their land to try and find it it was heavily wooded i was getting scratched up by all kinds of stuff but i got there and i found this one headstone now it wasn't a family member but it was like just knowing that somebody in my family had been memorialized i don't know how they're connected to me but they're connected to me somehow how did you feel how did you feel seeing that when you found that it was just like wow these are my people like somebody cared enough about my ancestors to memorialize them so that i would have the privilege today to see them to connect with them in this way that's awesome that's awesome so just just this week i saw a headstone for my aunt i knew her uh we called her aunt annie i'd never seen her headstone it popped up on um i can't remember where it popped up it might have been find a grave but i was like that's my aunt's head still i knew her like it was such a it was such a moment so i can relate to what you're talking about where you you see something uh symbolic and representative of your people that is awesome absolutely awesome well thank you thanks for introducing yourselves and sharing a little bit so i want to just introduce the bulk of our program and then we'll jump in so we're going to talk about black history month and some things that family search is doing for black history month we'll talk about some research resources available both for those who are beginning those who are more advanced those who are intermediates we'll talk about what's new that's either coming or has recently been released and also we would love as we go through we would love to hear your questions so we can make this you know as much of a an interactive dialogue as we can so so with that let's start black history month let's start on the personal level so what are you doing or what have you done to celebrate black history month kayla okay black history month i feel like has always been a big part of my family um and so i'm going to share something that we've done and i know that they're continuing to do even though i don't live at home with my parents anymore is every single february my dad he'd pull out these cards they were laminated pages and on one side was a picture of a prominent black man or woman and then on the other side was like a little synopsis or a biography and so what we did as a family every sunday after dinner is we would take these cards each person would be assigned an individual and we'd talk about them and the reason that my dad did this was because he just he feels so strongly and i as well that you need to hear these these stories of the positive contributions and the resiliency of prominent black men and women that they've been able to overcome challenges and barriers and make contributions to society that are positive and that if they can do that the moral the story after every conversation was why can't we and so that's something i love like learning history and i love that my dad always instilled that within us to know um know of black people that have made positive contributions because there are so many of them awesome awesome so tom let me pivot on that from what kayla was saying is there somebody in black history that you really look up to and admire oh for me uh that's a good question who in black history do i admire i mean there there's so many prominent you know figures in black history obviously we we hear about you know martin luther king jr we hear about malcolm x you know for me probably the one would be frederick douglass right and and for me part of it is the connection with one of the projects i did at family search over you know that that included the freedmen's bank and he was the president of the bank for a little while and and tried to help you know blacks who had been emancipated you know put their money in a bank and start to earn money and and things like that and so that's maybe not many people know that about frederick douglass and his role in the friedman bank and helping to create black wealth immediately after the civil war uh and so like just if you put me on the spot i got i got to stick with my man and he had like in the pictures like dude got like some just awesome hair he's great hair a beautiful qual yes yes awesome thank you thank you so let's talk now let's talk about the family search black history month hub page black history okay i would love to share my screen and show everyone um we wanted to create a place on the family search website on the blog to be a place where there are so many different resources available for those interested in celebrating black history and connecting with their heritage so if you go to familysearch.org black history month this is the page that will pull up let's see can you all see this yes can't quite see the title but we can see uh you can see the the frame okay so this is what the top of the page looks like i'm just going to briefly go through just some of the resources that are available um but the first thing that you'll see is there's an opportunity for you all to register for roots tech we'll talk about this um several times but it's super exciting that um black history month gets to coincide with our roots tech celebration and so as such we wanted to make sure that it was a priority to make roots tech and inclusive experiences so you can register for retech it's a free conference it's virtual and in mid february when classes are released we will be listing all of the classes available pertaining to african american and african heritage genealogy so there will be over 40 classes we're super excited about that another resource is the getting started guide that we have for those that are beginners to family history um specifically african american genealogy you can download this guide it's pdf it's free and we'll talk a little bit more more about that later on as well kayla can i interrupt for just a second for sure yeah if people are trying to to uh follow along on this page you mentioned the url but could you just mention that one more time it is familysearch.org black history month and i believe they will be posting that in the comments as well for you too so there's a chance for you to search for african heritage records we've compiled 68 different record collections pertaining to african american genealogy for you to search for your ancestors and then there's four different blog articles for you and your family to learn about different components of black history month learn about prominent black americans um that have made positive contributions to society so there's a lot on here and we just encourage you to go check it out let your friends and family know that this is a resource available to help you celebrate this month of black history i wanna i wanna give a shout out uh i'll go scroll back down on the page for michaela if you can to one of the articles that's down there our team did a lot of these articles and you personally and i want to thank you for the efforts you've made kayla in making this page available and bringing attention to black history and the link between black history and personal history but the black history month is for everyone is an article by one of our partners so a good friend of mine paula matabane uh lives in atlanta and she wrote this article kind of really talking about why everyone should celebrate black history month and how people can celebrate black history month even if you aren't black per se so i encourage people obviously check out the hub page and all the resources sign up for roots tech connect search the 68 collections get our get us getting started guide read about activities but also take some time if you really want to know black history month i have a lot of people who come to me and say what can i do to better you know to have a better black history month experience or to teach my kids and my family and and this is one of those resources that we've put out on behalf of family search for folks to do that oh i love that i love that idea let me just say one thing on that so um once i when i moved out here i live in utah now and where i grew up was great but one of the things about being out here was um surprisingly there were a lot of cultures and uh you know like sometimes i might get the question if i'm not black why would i you know worry about black history month but for me as i as i started to learn a little bit about i met some people who were from thailand and i met some people who were polynesian and it's my my personal uh experience in life is enriched by getting to know other cultures and so you know if black history month is new to you maybe you've never really thought about it uh this this article is a great place to start and you know everybody's human we and we share that human connection so that as you learn a little bit about black history and black heritage i i bet your life will be uplifted so give it a click yes anything else you want to say here about uh the black history month hub page no just but i'm looking in the comments and i'm seeing a lot of positive responses clara said this is great this is the help that i need we've had several people talk about how they're registered for reach tech and planning on attending um so this is great yeah please please use this as a resource for you and your family and friends awesome awesome great well so let's talk next about resources available from family search so this is like if you're if you're getting started if you're again if you're working on a project or if you're advanced and you want to know what's going on this is a great opportunity here you may want to take notes if you're if you haven't uh but i'm super excited let's talk about uh resources for beginners uh who wants to take the getting started guide i i can do beginners and then we'll have tom do the more advanced because i am not i am not advanced i am a hobbyist at most so just like i mentioned on the black history month hub page familysearch.org black history month we have compiled a getting started guide um it's in pdf format and it's just 10 steps to what we've called reclaiming your african roots so we want to help people who maybe feel overwhelmed they don't know where to start um this is a great resource to just kind of take you step by step on uh working towards filling out your family history in genealogy awesome so let me ask you kayla what's when you when you were working or when you were starting out on your genealogy what was one of the first obstacles you faced and how did you get past that yeah so i think um like many people you're just really overwhelmed you i i think our first inclination is when we get started with family history okay i'm gonna go on i'm going to create an account and i need to start adding names to the tree and there are so many awesome resources at family search but i felt like i came to the website not with certain pieces of information and so one of the things that i realized and as i was creating this guide and working with members of our team and genealogists and enthusiasts to come up with something is the realization that the best way to get started on your family history is to start with you start with yourself how are you recording your own personal history and then move on to your living relatives talk to your parents your siblings your cousins your uncles and your aunts um because they have all of these great stories and they have a wealth of information and as you talk to them you may pick up bits and and tidbits maybe it's a name or a date that will help you to add names to the tree so you'll notice on our getting started guide we when it comes to starting an account that is step four out of ten so the first three steps are really focused on having those conversations with those that you know starting with what you know taking the time to write in a journal and and see where are some gaps and who can i go to to to talk to and get more okay let me let me say one thing on that this starting with you so in my job i get to interview a lot of people like market research and one of the things i saw i just remember this so clearly we were in uh sacramento the sacramento california area doing uh interviews about family history and and over and over i heard people say my life's not important i'm trying to learn about my predecessors my ancestors but my life is not important and there was just this feeling that oh i won't record stuff about me because i'm not important but they were so interested in their mother so interested in their grandfather and and so uh getting started with yourself it really is important like your kids perhaps or nieces and nephews or whomever it is you know in your family that gets the genealogy bug they would love to know in probably in the future but they would love to know what obstacles did you face what did you uh what were your favorite foods what type of work did you do like some of those key details as well as the genealogical details that will help build the tree um you know that they can that they can kind of springboard off of about you awesome yeah i love that i would just say to that too you know when it comes to recording your own personal history sometimes we just think just a paper journal but i one of the things that i love to do is on my computer i have photo booth and i will record a video talk to the camera for even just like 60 seconds to give an update on my life and it's been kind of fun to go back and to watch those and see where i am so you can get really creative in the way that you record your own personal history and just like you said jonathan like people will value that you will value it looking back and seeing how far you've come and any future posterity or friends and family that you have that you want to share it with thank you thank you okay so shall we talk about uh well before we talk about the intermediate let me just let's just check in are there were there any beginner type questions or any questions on the getting started uh guide that we want to address right now so i'm seeing one question and it's actually a really great question to the segway if people have any questions for beginners um please i'll be scrolling through and looking but one individual said but what if you can't have those conversations so your parents are no longer around grandparents not around aunts and uncles all of them are gone um tom do you want to answer that question or john yeah no no it's it's it's so it's the so we in the genealogy community we have this principle called the fan principal the fin friends associates and neighbors right so you might not have family around but i remember after my mom passed away having a conversation with her best friend from high school and learning once more about my mom that i didn't know because i never talked to this woman she was my mama's best friend so you know as as a young man that wasn't appropriate to ask her all these questions about my mom but when my mom passed being able to ask janice taylor about my mother and the things that she knew started to help inform me and and so you may even if your parents or you're not around you might hopefully be able to talk to those who are around those friends those associates those neighbors you can also start to look at the things that that maybe your family were into like my my grandfather was a janitor and he actually got an award for his janitorial work at the high school that my dad went to and it's actually in a document in the gary city hall like and there's this news article about him and so and i'm like wow so you know look if you can't talk to people directly look at newspapers right and see if anything was ever written about them or or talk to those friends talk to those in a associates those neighbors anybody that you can study you know maybe where they worked or or or things like that and see if you can get any clues any more clues about those individuals that will help you as you move kind of down the line with your genealogical discoveries and pursuits okay thank you we've got a question from barbara and it is what was the app kayla that you mentioned to record video like when you were talking about recording video or audio if you want to go there so um a family search resource that we have for recording audio would be the family search memories app um there's an opportunity if you're interviewing someone or it could even be yourself where you get the app it's free um to record yourself but for me i am a mac user with my computer so i use the free application available photo booth and you can just record videos yeah okay so just to make sure everybody has that got that so if you've got a mac an imac or uh you know mac laptop right that photo booth program will let you do free videos right there yeah yeah yeah it's perfect super simple hey jonathan i was curious we were talking about this the other day what as you've gotten started with your genealogy what has helped you okay so when i came into genealogy i was so overwhelmed at first it just like i i saw this genealogy excuse me this this giant chart my uncle had done which i just i'm so impressed by but but i thought well how can i where do you start and there were there were two things that really helped me the uh the first one i just i had this great opportunity i was working in downtown salt lake and i was able to go to the family history library face to face i was trying to track down where my my great grandfather was from and the librarians there uh they helped me i had this one thing i found this one record up it was his world war i think world war ii draft card and it had his location and well i like it said p.o something and there's just this terrible handwriting couldn't read it and we couldn't find the city anyway they helped me find the city and that opened up that whole line i saw i found my grandfather's information all the way back to freed slaves and it was just so inspiring for me it really got me it really got me going the other thing i'll say if you're getting started if you tried genealogy 10 years ago or 15 years ago or whatever it's very different now like what family search offers what uh ancestry offers what my heritage offers there are so many records like if you can't talk to you know mom dad grandparents they're not around a lot of their records will be in one of these services like you you'll probably find them on family search and if not you'll find them on ancestry or or my heritage it's it's amazing i i was shocked i was shocked i love this one comment from one of our viewers june she said keep in mind that each child or sibling will remember something different about their parents grandparents and so i like that too like get multiple sources and different stories because everyone has a different perspective jonathan you you reminded me and you had the the opportunity to come down to the family history library in salt lake city and i kind of mentioned that earlier obviously because of covet restrictions we're not open to the public but one of the things that we've been trying to do to give others that same experience that you have that kind of one-on-one touch and and maybe to look at things is we started these virtual strategy research sessions so where you can actually go online and book a time where you can meet with one of our reference you know staff and research um librarians there and they will actually look at what you've put together if you have a family search account have a family tree they'll take a look at that they'll look at whatever records you want to submit and then they'll actually spend 20 minutes with you giving you you know answering some questions or giving you some tips and tricks or pointing you to kind of where the next step of your research needs to go in fact let me i'm going to go ahead and share my screen just so that people can like see awesome let me recap while you're pulling it up so so this is one of those hidden kind of blessings from covet like where before you had to go physically face to face to the library in many cases no right you can have uh you can have a free uh free help online from a genealogist or or someone who's got some experience in genealogy absolutely and so it's this virtual research strategy sessions this is on our family search wiki and we'll put the link make sure the link is in the comments of the facebook live just so people have it and they can get here quick quickly but if you did go to family search wiki and put virtual research strategy session or research session you'll come to this page and it really tells you what our our sessions are they're free virtual meetings designed to provide you with research guidance and all that kind of stuff right and they actually offer it in multiple languages not just english but also spanish also um chinese and american sign language we can do these these sessions with you in these various languages and it tells you kind of the booking process and the information that you'll have if you're doing a dna research strategy they'll expand the time a little bit beyond 20 minutes to 40 minutes um and we we asked just because there'll probably be a flood of people who want to come on here not to book more than one session in any given week this isn't meant to be your one-on-one like you know long-term family history research help i have lots of friends who are professional genealogists that would be willing to do that for you but in this case we want to point you to some of the resources we have available for free and there's a booking page so if you book your virtual research strategy session you can do this here now we're we're here talking obviously about black history month and the question that i've gotten every time i share this is is this okay for black folks or african americans like are they going to be able to help me and the answer is yes i booked a session and got help by one of our research specialists she she you know specializes she's an accredited genealogist that specializes in the southern us right where my people were and she was able to give me help and help me you know find additional records and give me some strategies and so it is for it's not just for african americans though it's for anyone obviously if you have questions we'll do our best to try and support you and answer them it's just one of these like you said jonathan it's a it's a kind of carryover it's one of those things that came out of covid is being able to to work with people in this virtual environment and give them some of the help and assistance that they're looking for okay thank you thank you so let's we we've got a couple of questions before we go to those i want to make sure we're about half past the hour so i want to make sure uh we're covering everything we want to uh do you want to talk to us tom about the intermediate advanced uh thing things here talk taking uh excuse me talking about the the digital bookshelf oh yeah so fun times like this again all these things that we're doing during covid right so so um one of the the the perks of of working for the family history library and being at the first family history library is our book collection our book collection is second to none um you know there are other genealogy libraries out there that have very strong book collections allen county public library for example and things like that but we have lots of books but we we realize that we also have taken the time to digitize hundreds of thousands of books like like just so many and so we decided to put together specifically as just a template and a test books that might be helpful for african americans in digital books that african americans may want to look at and we created what's called here the african-american digital bookshelf will again put the link in the facebook chat so people can see but this is if you go on our wiki again and search or even if you google family search african-american digital bookshelf you'll land on this page and what this page is is kind of a list of of curated list of accessible books that provide information on specific african american ancestors historical context and guidance to other resources you may use so so what are some what are some different like types of books like if i've never looked at a digital book on african-american genealogy or whatever and this is my first time like what types of things are we talking about here i would totally start with this first one at the top we've arranged it by by country obviously us and what's general but then it goes down by state but it gives you things like a bibliography and guide to sources so it points you to this specific digital book will point you to another source that will help you in doing your research so i'm just going to click on it here and pull up oh i'm going to have to sign in here real quick so i should have done this before we got online but hopefully no one's uh stealing my password right now but it will take you to this digital book by kurt witcher actually who who's from the on county public library and you can actually scroll through the various pages you can zoom in on the book but you can also scroll through the pages of the book um here and see various you can get more details on whatever it is the book has to offer so like okay so so so let me just jump in for a second so if you've never done this uh a lot of the younger people have done this for college but this is an actual book scanned in you're seeing it online i know many many of the genealogists this is old it's old hat to see things scanned in but if you've never done this before this is an actual book somebody's scanned it and you can go right through the pages from the convenience of your own home um how much is this tom how much i mean is this expensive or is this open everybody zero as my mom used to say 388 free 68 right uh yeah it costs nothing you know you you do need a family search account to to access the family search um books that are on here and for some of the organizations we've got books that are from internet archive that are from hottie trust we have one here from daughters of the american revolution google books anything that we've been able to acquire the rights to and digitize and we've kind of put them in this list now this list isn't exhausted but you may have to go to these other sites and they may ask you to create an account things like that to look at some of these other books but we've curated this list in hopes that even if you're sitting in your pajamas at two in the morning and you're interested hey does family search have a book on my family or does family search have a book on this location so let me go back here um for example there there's some like for my family in alabama is huge like i've been looking through all the records in all the books that we have in alabama and here are interesting about late insurrectional states there's a congressional thing from 1879 and there's slavery in auburn alabama is here and there's this can you mind zooming in for just a little bit more for those of us who are a little bit older uh so here's like the cyclopedia of colored baptism alabama their leaders and their work or the large slave holders of the deep south this one on the cyclopedia pillar baptist internet archive but the large slaveholders in the deep south is one that we have here at family service and this is one where if you know that you're your family you have enslaved ancestors that lived in alabama you might want to look at this book to see what kind of information might help you further in your research okay so let's pause for a second could we take a related question uh we have a question that says uh again related to plantations if if our ancestors were plantation owners the the writer asks what can i do to help others know who the people were on their lands oh this is a question i get all the time and and i appreciate people asking us the one is tell everybody in any way that you can um try i think one of the fastest strategies is in particular i get this by you know my white friends who find out that their family had owned slaves and had plantation records of enslaved individuals and what they can do is they can actually go on facebook for example and join some of these groups of you know some of these genealogy groups and say hey i've got papers from the hairston plantation or from you know the harding plantation would any of you and these sites be interested in this or where do i put this there's a project called beyond kin jonathan that you're familiar with that also where people can upload the names of enslaved people that they have from those various records and put them on that on beyond ken website and what's is their website is their website beyondkin.org beyondcan.org because for licensing purposes we can't show you that website so i can't go there but but if someone wants to put in beyond kin.org in the comments that's another site where you can upload aphro genius is another one there's several of my genealogy friends that can probably chime in and point people to other sources of where people can post information that they find on their you know if they have plantation records or they have information about enslaved individuals that their family maybe was involved in they can submit those papers or reach out to a local genealogical society a local historical society a local library all of them will take those kinds of things and we have relationships with many of those and hopefully we'll eventually get them to a point where they'll become accessible to more people through websites like family search and ancestry and others awesome thank you so looking at these this this large list of books if i've never looked at a genealogy based book how do i know where to like where would i start on this list you mentioned the bibliography which sounds great what's another way to kind of get started with this list by location i think is the biggest thing is is you want to know kind of the date the names dates and places where your ancestors were or the most helpful to get started and so if you know that you know your family lived in somerset county in maryland then this might be the book on internet archive that you want to look at a listing of slaves and indentured servants in somerset county right so you don't scroll down to maryland you come here you click on this book and and see if it has any kind of information so by location is really how we've had it organized to start this is kind of our first draft of this and and we know it's not complete and so we've allowed other if you have for example if you find an error of some reason you can submit an error or if you want to suggest a book that's digitized that we could have rights to you can send that to us and we can add it here so we know that this is going to continually be growing and we want people to come back but i'd start first at the location any anything you can do to kind of narrow down the place and the time that your ancestor was will make books and digitized books but particularly helpful and meaningful in your research okay okay awesome awesome well so up to this point we've we've covered quite a bit of ground we've been talking about what family search is doing for black history month a few things that we do uh personally we've talked about the black history month hub page the getting started guide the african-american digital bookshelf we're coming to the uh the upcoming and recent product releases um before we go to that is there anything else either of you had wanted to cover for intermediate or or advanced researchers uh i would also point people to our family service help center we have a learning center that has you know information there i was asked to go present to uh um an african american genealogical society in houston in april and i'm going to do that and the presentation i'm using is already on family search on african american resources on familysearch.org and so we have a lot of content in our help center and our learning center videos that you can look at and classes that are done not just by family search but by other people as well that's there but we're going to be infusing that with a bunch of content from roots tech connect i don't know if we're ready to go there yet but but um but and kayla you mentioned it earlier but roots this year's rooster connect is going to be off the chain [Laughter] if you are black if you actually if you're from anywhere in the world we got something for you with roots tech connect thousands literally thousands of classes overall covering every corner of the globe what i hear 234 000 people have already registered for this virtual event 202 countries and territories there aren't even 202 countries but when you add territories that people are from that are joining this this rootstech connect it is going to be bananas and and it's something that we've never done to this scale before but we are so excited and particularly me and and our team has been involved in the content for people of african descent with over tina said over 40 classes dealing with africa and the african diaspora we have classes on the continent of africa that will be taught in four languages english french portuguese and malagasy right like that will be teaching and research techniques and how to get started we've got people that are in london that are teaching classes we got people that are in south africa we have people in the caribbean teaching classes obviously the united states we got our girl sharon morgan as our keynote speaker like i it just rootscentconnect will be just phenomenal and so those who came today wanting to know what what one thing i might want to do or one thing i participate in reset connect it's free online just go to rootstech.org sign up and then you'll you'll see we're getting ready to release all the classes we don't have everything on the website quite yet but we're getting ready to release all the classes you will have a great experience navigating and getting to the content that you want you'll be able to create watch lists so there's no way you're going to be able to watch everything over the course of the three days we're running 24 7 for three days no way you're gonna be able to catch all that content right but it's going to be available the majority of it will be available for at least a year afterwards and a lot of that content will be putting into the learning center on familysearch.org but will also remain on rootstech.org for you to come back and look at later and so if i i can't stress enough y'all see i'm excited i see the smiles on your faces that just roots takes me i've been here seven years this is you know i love roots tech but we're doing something we've never ever done before is going to be so empowering and so enabling for so many people around the world okay so if you if uh our audience like this year we're having a ton of people who have never gone to roots tech before what just a quick overview kayla what is what is roots tech why are we calling it roots tech connect this year can you just give us a little overview on research so roots tech is a conference that family search holds and sponsors every year focused on genealogy so you'll usually hear from keynote speakers on the main stage and then you'll get to participate in different classes and it's typically always been in person in salt lake city but because of covid and the pandemic they've mixed it up this year and it is all online and virtual and so that's why it's called roots tech connect and the chance that we all globally have a chance to participate in this for free and so just like tom i'm so excited the fact that we have over 40 classes to help people of african descent or those that are interested in african american or african heritage genealogy is so awesome i am so excited to watch some of these classes awesome i'm just scrolling down the page on rootstech.org right now so you can see we just announced all our um the final batch of all our keynote speakers i mentioned sharon morgan but you know francesco la toro we've got sinitra sarker we've got you know here's a uruguayan professional footballer that's on here eric avari if you all know the chosen he's from you know he's been in that astrid tumenez the first um president of you first female president of utah valley university just all this and then these virtual connections like it says at your fingertips with keynote speakers classes from around the globe connect with family anywhere we've done this relatives at roots tech which is like a really fun way to see how you're connected and if you've got family there we've already started seeding that now and you can actually participate virtually with relatives at roots tech and see how many people that are attending roots tech have your last name for example or or how many family members have registered for roots tech and you can already cultural activities i mean it's just a ton of stuff there is something for everyone as the website says so i i went to roots tech last year for the first time um and i was surprised like my assumption was that it was a hundred percent genealogy focus like maybe heavy in the in the research side of it but there's really there's such a wide range so like uh last year they had for for uh anybody who wanted it especially like for young people there was a night specifically geared towards uh younger folks and they they had vr so you could look up you know wherever you lived like i looked i looked up my dad's home on vr i saw his truck um this is from before my dad had passed away it was such a nostalgic moment and then i was also surprised to see last year we had a a famous football player very very well-known football player as one of our keynote speakers he was awesome emmett smith go cowboy steven valentine i'm just anyway shout out to paul awesome well in our last uh 10 minutes or so let's talk about some some of the other things that's coming so roots tech is coming um some of these are a little bit down in into the details so maybe we start with the 49 record collections and then uh then we'll go to a couple things that i can share does that sound good to you yeah yeah yeah okay who wants to take the 49 record collections you want to go kayla you want me you take it tom i'll take it okay so we'll go back and share here i was on rootstech i gotta go back um oh this was the the getting started guy by the way if you wanted to see that um the 10 steps to reclaiming your african roots that we talked about earlier here's the actual guide and the different steps write down what you know and find artifacts around your home and things like that um and again that came from our all about black history hub page but one of the features we did last year kayla was great we created this video on this whole idea 29 ways and 29 days of black history you know being able to find your own roots and so we created this little widget if you will a search widget that allows you to search record collections we added um to the collections from last year so now there's a total of 68. i think he said 49 is 68 records 68 60 right that contain information on individuals of african descent in the united states so we focused here on the us and we plugged them all here so like i said earlier one of the key things you need to know when doing genealogy names dates and places and so you can look here you know if you want to you can look for tom baines in alabama and um let's go 1895 and see what this kind of comes up it goes into family search on the back end uh oh do it again do it one more time okay one more time and i'm having internet connection problems at home so i apologize y'all have probably seen stuff be slow to load and all this kind of stuff but here is different so we found 15 collections that had out of the 68 that had information on someone with the first name tom last name baines or some variant that's close to that in genealogy we know spelling clothes spelling counts and so it's not always going to be exact but looking in alabama in 1895 we looked at these 15 collections and we found 140 results we're displaying here the first 1 to 20 of them but you can display more and here you can see you know there's there's information on individuals named tom bain or tom baines that may be connected to alabama in some way here's new york municipal deaths here's the 1860 slave schedule from the u.s here's texas voter records where he this thomas bean or maybe bane you have to go and look at the record itself you may be able to determine more information and so that's just a fun little way we initially started this actually from discover friedman.org when we did the freeman's bureau project because we had 14 different record collections that people could search and so we made this like search widget just like we have here and we've carried that over and now are using it here obviously for for black history month and african heritage records but we're also using it for records from other uh countries around the world as well and again if someone has just joined us and they want to use this search how would they get here just so the the url is familysearch.org slash black history month this is on our all about black history month page and you as you scroll down you'll see information about black history month roots tech connect about getting started with your family history and searching these records as well as some of our blog posts so here you can search these records these different collections these 68 collections our team's been working woo boys it's a ton of folks behind us we may be the front people talking on facebook live right now but there are so many people who are dedicated to making the experience for people of african descent and those researching those of african descent a much better richer deeper experience of discovery and connection they're committed as an organization to this and and this is just one of the manifestations of that awesome so in our last few minutes here let me also share a couple of other quick updates so one is uh the us censuses so um the ability to search on race has been added that's live now let me share my screen um this is just a great a great thing if you're someone who has you know maybe you're in a situation where you have a common last name and you're on family search and you're searching under records like i have relatives who are smiths and they live in a big city so if i'm searching for smith you know and i'm searching in new york city that's a that's a tough uh that's a tough list to uh to search through but now i can filter on race so i can say oh well my people were uh white or they're black or mulatto or or so on and so forth and you can see um you can see the different races here that you can search through it so to get to this so this this isn't on every record set but on the us censuses uh you can ha you can now search on race so that's uh that's a key feature to get there you're going into into family search into records you'll see a nice this nice map here and just below that you can type in the us the united states census uh so i'm having trouble typing while you're all watching but but the us says that's okay we know you know how to spell brother okay it's in there it's in there the other thing i just briefly want to mention i'm gonna go a little quickly as we're coming to the end of our time so uh if you're from africa or have relatives from africa family search has undertaken uh a massive project it's a it's a really beautiful project it's called the oral genealogy project and there are people going from village to village and country to country in africa meeting with families and village elders and writing down their oral spoken their spoken genealogies and this has been going on for some time there's there's new things coming for this but i want you to see what exists now this is in our genealogy section again you go to family search you're clicking on search you're going into genealogies and we have 20 million different names of folks uh names of people who's whose information was gathered in these oral genealogies the oral genealogies currently are mostly from africa from west africa in ghana uh some in nigeria and then there's some other oral genealogies from different parts of uh the polynesian islands and so forth and so i just want to make sure you saw those again oral genealogies if you know people from africa or any of the polynesian cultures they might find those those spoken genealogies here okay that's awesome we got a whole another program we need to talk about at some point about what we're doing with oral histories and or genealogy collection jonathan it would take an hour and it people will be so amazing it's amazing it's absolutely off the charts okay well so we're wrapping up uh kayla any parting words and we'll just go around the room and any parting words from each of us parting words come to roots tech register for roots tech take part in all of the classes participate with the main stage and see our keynotes and i guess when it comes to family history just keep going there are weeks and months where sometimes you don't find anything and there's a dry spell and then there are other weeks where you found over 200 of your ancestors and are putting them in the trees so just keep going there's so many different resources continue to watch these live streams because i know you'll be able to find information to help you find your family thank you tom um rootstech but also take advantage we shared with you a lot of things and i couldn't echo you know any more loudly what what kayla said we're we publish millions of records every day literally every day we're updating our databases with millions of records and so if you don't find what you're looking for today come back and look tomorrow um but and look next week and look after that but come to roots tech connect be a part of what we're doing there let that be a good jumping off you know part for you and continue on we pointed lots of resources hopefully you've got the links this this live stream will stay up on our facebook page so those watching on facebook will be able to come back and if they want to take advantage of the virtual uh research strategy sessions or if they want to look at the african-american digital bookshelf or if they want to register for rootstech connect the links are all in the comments there but we we want to make sure that you know that there's resources for you it may be a struggle and and you know there's no bones about it it you know for many african-americans research gets a little bit difficult but we're working with so many different groups and organizations in fact next week's facebook live will be with african-american genealogical societies and groups that are out there that you can join that you can learn from we're all supporting and trying to help each other just you know discover our ancestors and be able to connect with our homeland so stay stay connected what time is next week's what time is next week's uh next week's at 4 at 3 p.m uh pacific 4 p.m mountain 5 pm central and 6 p.m eastern time so february 10th february 10th come back i'll be on here again with my craziness and virtual backgrounds and all kinds of stuff with for my friends for the genealogy community i'm so excited to connect with everybody next week awesome thank you uh thank you thank you tom thank you kayla thank you my pleasure great to uh it's just been a great opportunity and again um what a wonderful thing to be engaged in this is a a great way to find meaning even during quarantine you know to research your family and get to know your own family better thanks for joining us happy black history month bye

Channel: FamilySearch

Views: 1,169

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: diverse Voices, black history month, familysearch, familysearch rootstech 2021, family search, african, african american ancestry, african culture, african heritage, black history, i am black history, ancestor stories, ancestors, ancestory, ancestry, family history, family tree, genealogy, geneology, basic family tree, family connection, family history for beginners, genealogy research, genealogy research tips, how to do genealogy research, research

Id: Mx_NU7FIsPs

Length: 55min 22sec (3322 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021