February 25th Genealogy Showcase

Hey everyone, I know it's been several months since my last post.

I'm still not totally back to the genealogy but I am trying to at least stay active these days. On February 4th, I attended the the Spring Genealogy Conference, African American Genealogy: Overcoming Roadblocks, at St. Augustine University in Raleigh.

Later in the month, February 25th, the African-American Heritage Ministry at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, put on a Genealogy Showcase. I'm a member of both the church and the ministry. The ministry tries to plan activities throughout the year in order to try to educate the members of our church, especially our youth, about our history and heritage. However, most of our activities are centered around the month of February.

Several of these activities center around genealogy / family history. Last year, one of the other members of the ministry and I conducted a 1 1/2 hour presentation on getting started in genealogy.

This years event was the Genealogy Showcase. We invited the members of the church to participate and share part of their family's history. In addition we invited several of the local genealogy organizations, including AAHGS - AAGIG, Comprehensive Genealogical Services, and the Mecklenburg County Library. Guest speaker, via Skype, was Dr. Gina Paige of African Ancestry DNA.

Due to several events, such as the CIAA tournament, occurring that same weekend, attendance and participation was not what we had hoped for but it was still a nice event.

Here are some of the visual displays.

This first one is from my friend, Beatrice Cox. Mrs. Cox and I are the main two researchers in the ministry. She's the one I did last year's presentation with.

This next display is from our chair person, Cynthia Dumizo. Cynthia, as well as Mrs. Cox, are very active in a local group, Comprehensive Genealogical Services, which is active in finding local abandoned slave cemeteries.

This was the beginning of the display by another of our ministry members, Rosalyn Johnson. Originally, this was all that Rosalyn had planned to bring. She was planning to use a corner of my table but I ended up using my entire table, so Rosalyn ran back home and brought in some other materials. Since I was also doing a lot of running around (even going back home myself), I did not get a picture of Rosalyn's completed table.

The following tables were done by other members of the church and unfortunately, I didn't get their names.

And last but not least, here are the pictures of my table. If I had known we could use more than one table, I would have definitely brought more materials but for this being the first time of doing a visual display, I think it turned out okay. I got several tips from the Conference / Workshop earlier in the month that I employed in creating my displays.