lineage – Lineage Journeys

January 21, 2019

Learning About Tribal Research

Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy is over …. sigh

Leaving Salt Lake City after an incredible, intense, really fun week at SLIG – Salt Lake Institute for Genealogy. I took the course “Exploring Native American Research”. Learning about the records of the Native tribes of the United States was so interesting, varied and we learned at depth. We each received a different person to research, based on our personal request about learning about a particular tribe. I had a very interesting man, Edgar L. Powell, a Choctaw man who was a long-time Methodist minister in Indian Territory. Three marriages, five children (at least that I found) and frequently moving to serve congregations that asked him to come.

What was the best about the research on Edgar, and the Choctaw, was that the same or very similar records exist for my Lakota family. My Métis family in Québec have different records and some the same so I’ll look into some of that later, but in the meantime, while I was at the Family History Library, I took advantage of the time to also look into some of the Lakota records. Interesting, impactful and fun!

We had to write a short report on the person we researched, and we received some instructions from one of our instructors, Rick Fogarty (he was a great teacher!!), apparently none of us heard them!!! LOL! Rick said that we were all over-achievers because we went well beyond what he asked of us. Too funny ….. the challenge of working with, teaching a group of skilled researchers who are used to doing client work and having the professional passion to do anything we do with the same attention to detail that we give to our clients. LOL!

Rick and fellow teacher/researcher/mom Billie Fogarty gave us SO much to think about! Sharing about record groups, examples of ways to analyze the records, information about the kinds of records that were created for the various ways that the government and tribe would document the people. We heard from Paula Stuart Warren about her many years of research and work in the Native/tribal research area (she had been one of my first teachers at lectures I attended back in the 1990s!), sharing many examples from a wide variety of tribes including her experiences working with tribal enrollment offices.

Last night was the final banquet with awards, door prizes (wish I would have won!), and a really great keynote by Dr. Tom Jones, one of the early teachers that I learned from back in the 1990s. I had the privilege of learning from him at my first institute last summer – GRIP: Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh. I took at documentation/citations course from him to improve my ability to cite my research.

Classmates from SLIG 2019 – Native Research at the Family History Library, ready to finalize our homework; from our course with Rick and Billie Fogarty, Melissa Johnson, Paula Stuart-Warren & Paul Graham

All in all, it was both overwhelming, exciting, hard, challenging and engaging. We had the “challenge” of a really cold room so we all were drinking hot beverages, wearing layers. The hotel eventually figured it out and the room finally was better on Thursday and Friday. I was so impressed with SLIG! I really want to attend again – not sure about next year, although there are always DNA courses so that may be what I sign up for. I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn from such high-quality, nationally-recognized speakers. Such a memorable week!! The work of Lineage Journeys, the content that I provide to my clients will be better thanks to these great instructors – Rick and Billie Fogarty, Paula Stuart-Warren, Melissa Johnson, and Paul Graham! In the Lakota language, wopila – thank you.

January 23, 2018

Thank you, GeneaBloggers!

THANK YOU to GeneaBloggers for accepting my blog into your great list of fellow genealogy bloggers!! I was featured TODAY – January 23, 2018 – and this will go down in my history with Lineage Journeys as another NEW OPPORTUNITY to share with so many in a new way!

Future posts here will include information, resources and links to content that I’m creating for Acadian, French-Canadian, Native/First Nations/Indian or Indigenous research, and locality information for Michigan, Ontario, Quebec and more! Lineage Journeys provides the unique perspective of the ancient spiritual traditions of North America and Europe along with research-based documentation of lineages, family histories and immigration pathways that define the heritage of the customer’s family.

So STAY TUNED for more!!! And thank you, again, GeneaBloggers!!!

August 18, 2017March 2, 2021

Your Ancestry May Not Be What You Think!

Source: Advice to White Supremacists: You Might Not Want to Test Your DNA

Thank you, Dick Eastman!

I was thinking, praying about these recent events and remembering some key times as a genealogist in California. I volunteered in a Family History Center as I could translate French and German and the Mormon volunteers had asked me to help out once per week.

As my contact with customers, through Lineage Journeys, evolved over the weeks and months of volunteering, we began to have a fairly steady flow of people from a particular area of town. Known to be descendants of those who migrated to California during the Dust Bowl era, they were descended from people primarily from Oklahoma, Missouri and a few from northern Texas. They came in, as one of them told me, “to document our superior family” …. hmmmm, “superior” equated to “white” and their conversation indicated that they were affiliated in some way with white/neo-nazi groups that I knewto be in the area.

It didn’t take long (perhaps three generations of ancestors) to find census records that indicated “mulatto” – the term used for mixed race individuals on the old census records. Explaining that to these research customers became my personal, silent joy as their visions of superiority were revealed for the arrogant falsehood that they were. Many of them stated variations of “the records were manipulated” or “the census taker lied” or any number of other ways to avoid the obvious.

The fact that “race” isn’t a scientific or biological fact anyway would have been lost on these families, and my personal and professional research experiences had long before shown me that our families migrated, lived in many communities, searched for jobs and good work, and married across religious and ethnic lines for centuries. No surprise here that some “white” people had relationships in the past that weren’t with those of European origin.