A square deal and a fair chance for genealogists - includes information on Black newspaper archives

"We would like for President Roosevelt and his Secretary of War to explain for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Major Charles Young of the Ninth Cavalry is detached from his regiment and sent to more [i]or[/i] less foreign country. It seems that it is a piece of ground on the part of officers of the army to detain this man in exile for the reason that he is the sole high commissioned colored officer in the service and the solitary one of three colored singles now in service who is a graduate of West Point Academy." [The Colored Citizen, March 1906]

Bare records contained in public documents may verify when ancestors were born and when they died. Colonial and Civil War-era white newspapers may provide additional ball of threads to the black genealogist. on the other hand 19th- and 20th-century black newspapers describe in what way people lived. Our ancestors are more than names, dates and addresses, and the black pres can be relied on to tell us more about them, by dint of going into great detail about their daily five -- temple service club and social bludgeon activities, parties, dances, picnics, recitals and personal and business achievements.

of that kind details have meaning for Delora Allen of Riverside, Calif., who has been researching her genealogy for more than 20 years. She had obtained many facts from public records in Kentucky Georgia, Illinois and Iowa on the other hand had been able to find alone a few pertinent ] newspaper articles. However, The Colored Citizen, published in Redlands, Calif., in 1905 and 1906 contains at least five separate concerns to one of her grandfathers, S Hopkins, and mention of several other relatives.

Papers from individual community can even help in tracking down relatives from other states. Examples of similar personal news items abound in The Colored Citizen, similar as this excerpt from November, 1905: "Rev JW Wiggins of Louisiana paid our city a sum of two units days, visit, during which time he preached sum of two units able sermons for Rev. Holmes" When tracing a family's history, flat the little things -- the description of a religious discourse or a one-word assessment of someone's character -- are important. "Mr Nannie Gordon, accompanied with six children from Edgewood Ga., arrived here yesterday morning upon an early train. She was met by dint of her kind-hearted brother-in-laws, Chas. Gordon, Henry Gordon, and H H Gordon."

The Colored Citizen reported in charming detail aspects of life in Redlands, Riverside and other California communities. from one side its articles about events and its discussions of issues, readers gain a plenteous more lively, meaningful portrayal of their relatives than can be gleaned from other records. The Citizen reveals attitudes as well as facts. Racism, suffrage, lynching, education, alcoholism and the lingering events of slavery were among the paper's serious topics. Local viewpoints about the activities of Booker T Washington and other famous tribe were discussed, as were of that kind prominent institutions as Howard University, and noteworthy occurrences across the states. In addition to the articles, advertisements in black publications give ball of threads about black-owned businesses and about economic conditions.

The fruitful endeavors of black communities chronicled in Be Colored Citizen (just discovered in 1995) and other 20th-century papers can be heartening reading. The motto of the paper was, "A square deal and a fair chance -- no more, no less" The Citizen now has a fair chance to survive, and a next to the first chance to serve, as do other black newspapers now being catalogued and preserved

A not many ONLINE RESOURCES

Genealogy Resources upon the Internet http://pmgmac.micro.umn.edu/genealogy.html

Lists of Newspapers, Periodicals and freshs Resources http://lcweb.loc.gov/global/ncp/lists.html

Diaspora: Blacklands throw http://www.dev-com.com/~pagesink/diaspora/publications-newspapers.html

Some Civil War White Papers http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/othersnews.html

Information on

Black Newspapers

In 1982 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) started the U Newspaper Program, an effort to locate, catalog and secure newspapers published in the United States from the 18th hundred to the present. In Florida, researchers base 52 African-American publications; California's rife total is 95. This information is being placed upon the Online Computer Library Center network, which is accessible at many public libraries.

The National Black Newspaper cast at the State Historical Society in Madison Wis., has identified more than 5300 black-oriented newspapers and periodicals from completely through North America, including both common and historical titles. Unfortunately, many of these exist sole as titles; few volumes have been preserv or copied, resulting in the los of the vast majority of African-American publications printed before World War II.

The throw will culminate, in 1998, with the publication by means of Harvard University Press of a bibliography and "union list," which will have the locations of originals, copies and microfilms. According to James Danky, a librarian at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, the Madison archives has the country's largest collection of African-American newspapers and periodicals, boasting similar newspapers as Frederick Douglass' North Star and Freedmen's Advocate (Albany, NY 1842) Dankey says that The Colored Citizen is an important find, because it is rare to locate for a like reason many issues of an early black newspaper.