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Amazon.com Books: American Genealogy

The Source: A Guidebook Of American Genealogy (Third Edition)

Genealogists and other historical researchers have valued the first two editions of this work, often referred to as the genealogist's bible." The new edition continues that tradition. Intended as a handbook and a guide to selecting, locating, and using appropriate primary and secondary resources, The Source also functions as an instructional tool for novice genealogists and a refresher course for experienced researchers. More than 30 experts in this field--genealogists, historians, librarians, and archivists--prepared the 20 signed chapters, which are well written, easy to read, and include many helpful hints for getting the most out of whatever information is acquired. Each chapter ends with an extensive bibliography and is further enriched by tables, black-and-white illustrations, and examples of documents. Eight appendixes include the expected contact information for groups and institutions that persons studying genealogy and history need to find.

Hardcover: 992 pages
Company: Ancestry Publishing (2006-06-01)
ISBN: 1593312776
List Price: $79.95
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Researching African American Genealogy in Alabama

Over the past two decades, in workshops and personal consultations, thousands of persons have have received the expertise and knowledge of author Frazine Taylor about Alabama genealogical research. Now in her book, Researching African American Genealogy in Alabama: A Resource Guide, Frazine provides the information and guidance to help locate the resources available for researching African American records in archives, libraries, and county courthouses throughout the state. The idea for this guidebook rose out of her lecturing throughout the country and having noticed that reference guides on African American family history resources seemed to exist for every state except Alabama. This was regrettable not merely for researchers on African American history in Alabama. In fact, Alabama's records play an especially important role in U.S. family history research because of the migration patterns of Alabama's freedmen, first to urban areas of Alabama and then to northern cities, a trend that continued throughout the first part of the twentieth century.

Author: Frazine Taylor
Paperback: 168 pages
Company: NewSouth Books (2008-10-01)
ISBN: 1603060448
List Price: $19.95
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Finding a Place Called Home: A Guide to African-American Genealogy and Historical Identity, Revised and Expanded

"I teach the kings of their ancestors so that the lives of the ancients might serve them as an example, for the world is old but the future springs from the past."
Mamadou Kouyate "Sundiata", An Epic of Old Mali, a.d. 1217-1257

Two major questions of the ages are: Who am I? and Where am I going? From the moment the first African slaves were dragged onto these shores, these questions have become increasingly harder for African-Americans to answer. To find the answers, you first must discover where you have been, you must go back to your family tree--but you must dig through rocky layers of lost information, of slavery--to find your roots.

During the Great Migration in the 1940s, when African-Americans fled the strangling hands of Jim Crow for the relative freedoms of the North, many tossed away or buried the painful memories of their past. As we approach the new millennium, African-Americans are reaching back to uncover where we have been, to help us determine where we are going.

Finding a Place Called Home is a comprehensive guide to finding your African-American roots and tracing your family tree. Written in a clear, conversational, and accessible style, this book shows you, step-by-step, how to find out who your family was and where they came from.

Beginning with your immediate family, Dr. Dee Parmer Woodtor gives you all the necessary tools to dig up your past: how to interview family members; how to research your past using census reports, slave schedules, property deeds, and courthouse records; and how to find these records. Using the Internet for genealogical research is also discussed in this timely and necessary book.

Finding a Place Called Home helps you find your family tree, and helps place it in the context of the garden of African-American people. As you learn how to find your own history, you learn the history of all Africans in the Americas, including the Caribbean, and how to benefit from a new understanding of your family's history, and your people's.

Finding a Place Called Home also discusses the growing family reunion movement and other ways to clebrate newly discovered family history.

Tomorrow will always lie ahead of us if we don't forget yesterday. Finding a Place Called Home shows how to retrieve yesterday to free you for all of your tomorrows.

Finding a Place Called Home:  An African-American Guide to Genealogy and Historical Identity takes us back, step-by-step, including: Methods of searching and interpreting records, such as marriage, birth, and death certificates, census reports, slave schedules, church records, and Freedmen's Bureau information.

  Interviewing and taking inventory of family members
  Using the Internet for genealogical purposes
  Information on tracing Caribbean ancestry

Author: Dee Parmer Woodtor
Paperback: 512 pages
Company: Random House Reference (1999-11-16) (1999-11-16)
ISBN: 037570843X
List Price: $18.00
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Honor & Remembrance: A Poetic Journey through American History

When Laurence Overmire completed Honor and Remembrance: A Poetic Journey through American History, this prolific poet knew immediately to whom he would dedicate his book of heart, history and healing: his parents, Mary Lou (Fast) and Raymond Edwin Overmire, Jr. What he did not know was that, shortly after its publication, he would lose both of them. The knowledge of this couple’s passing just twelve days apart only adds to the poignancy of this special book.

An accomplished genealogist, Overmire has joined together his love of the history of America and his own personal journey. Now as America stands at the beginning of a new chapter in our common story, this book provides a perfect way to remind ourselves where we’ve been and to consider where we'd like to go.

As reviewed by Joneve McCormick, poet and publisher of the literary journal Soul to Soul: “I was thrilled when I read the opening poem, Embark, and enchanted throughout with the magic and color of the American Dream, authentically presented here in multi-dimensional, whole fabric. These poems reach deeply into the American psyche… I recommend it to those whose roots run deep here and those newly arrived to the Promise, and hope we can all find the same qualities within ourselves that our forbearers manifested -- the love, honor, courage, compassion, sacrifice and endurance -- to keep the flame of the Promise brightly burning.”

About the Author

Laurence Overmire has had a multi-faceted career as a writer, actor, director, educator and genealogist. His award-winning poetry has been widely published in the U.S. and abroad in hundreds of journals, magazines and anthologies. Known to many as the poet-in-residence on the Jeff Farias Show, he is an advocate for peace, justice, human and animal rights, and the environment. Though his work can be provocative in its direct confrontation of social issues, he continually underscores the need for understanding and compassion in the world.

He has performed on stage, film and television on both coasts and in-between including the Broadway production of Amadeus and the network television soap operas All My Children and Loving. He also served as Executive Producer of The Writer’s Lab, a non-profit organization in Hollywood to promote quality writing in the entertainment industry. A strong supporter of arts education, he has taught and designed programs for Lincoln Center Institute and Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City among others. He now lives in West Linn, Oregon, with his wife Nancy McDonald, an accomplished actor, director and arts educator.

To find out more about the poet, go to www.laurenceovermire.com. To find more of his published works, go to www.imarkbooks.com.

Author: Laurence Overmire
Kindle Edition: 41 pages Kindle eBook
Company: Indelible Mark Publishing (2011-05-01) (2011-05-01)
List Price: $4.99
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Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (American Philosophy)

Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems.

Author: Colin Koopman
Paperback: 320 pages
Company: Indiana University Press (2012-12-12) (2012-12-12)
ISBN: 025300621X
List Price: $30.00
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American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama's family saga is a remarkable, quintessentially American story—a journey from slavery to the White House in five generations. Yet, until now, little has been reported on the First Lady's roots. Prodigiously researched, American Tapestry traces the complex and fascinating tale of Michelle Obama's ancestors, a history that the First Lady did not even know herself. Rachel L. Swarns, a correspondent for the New York Times, brings into focus the First Lady's black, white, and multiracial forebears, and reveals for the first time the identity of Mrs. Obama's white great-great-great-grandfather—a man who remained hidden in her lineage for more than a century.

American Tapestry illuminates the lives of the ordinary people in Mrs. Obama's family tree who fought for freedom in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars; who endured the agonies of slavery, the disappointment of Reconstruction, the displacement of the Great Migration, and the horrors of Jim Crow to build a better future for their children. Swarns even found a possible link to the Jewish Reform movement.

Though it is an intimate family history, American Tapestry is also the collective chronicle of our changing nation, a nation in which racial intermingling lingers in the bloodlines of countless citizens and slavery was the crucible through which many family lines—black, white, and Native American—were forged.

Epic in scope and beautifully rendered, this is a singularly inspiring story with resonance for us all.

Author: Rachel L. Swarns
Hardcover: 400 pages
Company: Amistad (2012-06-19) (2012-06-19)
ISBN: 0061999865
List Price: $27.99
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Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)

After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant "information wanted" advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freedpeople as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, frustration, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade.
Williams follows those who were separated, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the sympathy, indifference, hostility, or empathy expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations.

Author: Heather Andrea Williams
Hardcover: 272 pages
Company: The University of North Carolina Press (2012-06-01)
ISBN: 0807835544
List Price: $30.00
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The Researcher's Guide to American Genealogy, Third Edition

In every field of study there is one book that rises above the rest in stature and authority and becomes the standard work in the field. In genealogy that book is Val Greenwood's Researcher's Guide to American Genealogy. Arguably the best book ever written on American genealogy, it is the text of choice in colleges and universities or wherever courses in American genealogy are taught. Of the dozens of textbooks, manuals, and how-to books that have appeared over the past twenty-five years, it is the one book that is consistently praised for setting a standard of excellence. The Researcher's Guide has become a classic. While it instructs the researcher in the timeless principles of genealogical research, it also identifies the various classes of records employed in that research, groups them in convenient tables and charts, gives their location, explains their uses, and evaluates each of them in the context of the research process. Designed to answer practically all the researcher's needs, it is both a textbook and an all-purpose reference book. And it is this singular combination that makes The Researcher's Guide the book of choice in any genealogical investigation. It is also the reason why if you can afford to buy only one book on American genealogy in a lifetime, this has to be it. This new 3rd edition incorporates the latest thinking on genealogy and computers, specifically the relationship between computer technology (the Internet and CD-ROM) and the timeless principles of good genealogical research. It also includes a new chapter on the property rights of women, a revised chapter on the evaluation of genealogical evidence, and updated information on the 1920 census. Little else has changed, or needs to be changed, because the basics of genealogy remain timeless and immutable. This 3rd edition of The Researcher's Guide, then, is a clear, comprehensive, and up-to-date account of the methods and aims of American genealogy--an essential text for the present generation of researchers--and no sound genealogical project is complete without it.

Author: Val D. Greenwood
Paperback: 662 pages
Company: Genealogical Publishing Company (2000)
ISBN: 0806316217
List Price: $39.95
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A Student's Guide to Native American Genealogy (Oryx American Family Tree Series)

This series of student research tools explains the process of genealogical research while creating opportunities to practice and integrate social studies skills. It aims to promote better student understanding of solid research techniques and enhances the American curriculum. The series supplements the thematic strands in the New Curriculum standards for social studies in American schools, such as: culture, time, continuity, and change; individual development and identity; power, authority, and governance; people, places, and environment; individuals, groups, and institutions; global connections. The series also aims to provide students with the opportunity to practice the historian's craft as they learn how to: collect data; use the latest electronic research tools; obtain and evaluate documents and sources; conduct and record eyewitness acounts of historical events in family life. Each volume also explains to students the "whys" and "hows" of tracing their roots if they are adopted or come from non-tradtional families.

Author: E. Barrie Kavasch
Hardcover: 192 pages
Company: Greenwood (1996-07-22)
ISBN: 0897749758
List Price: $36.95
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The Pursuit of Local History: Readings on Theory and Practice (American Association for State and Local History)

Paperback: 300 pages
Company: Altamira Press (1996-06-11)
ISBN: 0761991697
List Price: $34.95
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genealogical research (Category: Books )

Netting Your Ancestors : Genealogical Research on the I

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 03:18:53 PDT

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