Augusta Public Library Local History and Genealogy

Thursday, July 7 @ 6:00 pm
Savannah River Meanderings–Book Talk and Signing with author Lillian Powell Benson
Augusta Public Library Auditorium
Join the Georgia Room as we welcome author Lillian Powell Benson for a nostalgic journey down the Savannah River. Ms. Benson grew up in Burke County, Georgia, the granddaughter of William Henry Powell who–like his father before him–plied the Savannah River as a riverboat captain and expert fisherman. For years, Ms. Benson kept a manuscript written by her “papa” about his life on the river, always dreaming of publishing a book honoring him, and his memories of the Savannah. Savannah River Meanderings is a dream come true for Ms. Benson, a story of a family whose lives were spent in natural harmony with the rhythms of the river. Call the Georgia Room for details, 706-826-1511.

BATTER UP: A HISTORY OF AUGUSTA BASEBALL IN IMAGES AND MEMORABILIA

The Georgia Room will feature an exhibit of all things baseball on loan from local collector and Augusta baseball aficionado, Lamar Garrard. The display will feature Ty Cobb, as well as programs and photos of the Augusta Tigers, Augusta Yankees, Jennings Stadium and Warren Park. Other players featured will be George Stallings, Bill Johnson, Lou Brissie, Harry Smythe and more. Memorabilia from the Augusta Pirates and the Augusta Greenjackets will be included, and photos of the 1913 Richmond Academy baseball team. Photos of Augusta teams in 1908 and 1921, and miscellaneous player photos of the early 1900s will also be on display. The exhibit will be up from June-July 2016.

Saturday, June 11 @ 2:00 pm
Beyond Basics: Taking Family History Research to the Next Step

Hit a brick wall in your family research? Don’t know what to do or where to go for that next clue? Join Tina Rae Floyd in the Georgia Room on the third floor of the Augusta Public Library as she helps you find ways to break down those walls. This is an intermediate level class, so participants must be familiar with basic genealogical concepts and be comfortable navigating such genealogy databases as Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. Please call 706-826-1511 to register.

Wednesday, May 25 @ 2:00 pm
Researching your War of 1812 Ancestor
The War of 1812, often called America’s Second Revolution left behind a set of records that have proven valuable for genealogical research. Many of these records can help solve pre-1850 census issues when only the head of household was named in the U.S. federal census. Participants will learn about the War of 1812, the major record sets of benefit to genealogists, how to identify service information such as location and military section of service and which records are available online. Presenter Thomas MacEntee aka the Genealogist Ninja, is a genealogy professional who’s also a blogger, educator, author, social media connector, online community builder and more. This Legacy Family Tree webinar is free and open to the public. Please call 706-826-1511 to register.

Please join us tomorrow, Tuesday, April 26th at 10:30 am in the 3rd floor computer lab of the Augusta Public Library for Preserving Your Family Heirlooms.
In celebration of American Library Association’s Preservation Week, April 24-April 30, the Georgia Heritage Room welcomes Lauren Virgo, Registrar for the Augusta Museum of History. Ms. Virgo will teach us tricks of the trade for protecting our family treasures from the deleterious effects of light, dust, insects, and aging. Items discussed will be documents such as letters and diaries; photographs and scrapbooks; and textiles, such as quilts and vintage clothes. By learning simple preservation techniques our family heirlooms can be saved for generations to come. Please call the Georgia Heritage Room for details, 706-826-1511.

Wednesday, May 4
2:00 pm
Getting Started Researching your Jewish Ancestors
Whether you have a Jewish ancestors or have a desire to assist others, this webinar will step you through the recommended research process. Presenter Jennifer M. Alford will present tips on unique aspects of Jewish life and guide viewers through the discovery of the hometown of her great-grandfather. Jennifer M. Alford is a freelance writer, artist and professional genealogist specializing in research in Jewish genealogy and the Midwest. This Legacy Family Tree webinar is free and open to the public. Please call the GeorgiaHeritage Room to register, 706-826-1511.

Published last year, Wright State University associate professor of history, Dr. Noeleen McIlvenna’s work, The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South, 1733-1750 explores the first twenty years of Georgia’s establishment as a free labor colony. Exhaustively researched, Dr. McIlvenna examines, among other unpublished primary sources, the collected papers of Georgia Trustee, John Viscount Percival, Earl of Egmont, and James Habersham, prominent Colonial merchant. McIlvenna chose to examine the papers of these prominent men to tell not the stories of those who came to dominate Colonial Georgia but to learn about the lives of those first settlers, the “worthy” European poor the trustees recruited to populate the free colony. Because they left scant sources behind, very little is known of the poor laboring men and women who built early Georgia, but McIlvenna’s expert comparative analysis of primary sources allows for a complex picture to emerge.

Before the 1750 end of the ban on slavery, Georgia, the last of the British colonies in North America was a philanthropic experiment, a sort of noblesse oblige utopian idea dreamt up by James Oglethorpe and put into action by a select group of “Enlightened” English elites to give the masses of landless and dispossessed poor a chance at “salvation” through hard work. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, common lands in England, traditionally worked and hunted by peasants, became the sole property of the nobility, forcing a mass diaspora of the poor into cities searching for work. Unable to find work, many were forced to live on the streets, or ended up in the notorious British workhouse system. According to McIlvenna, the British upper classes created the problem by privatizing the land, thereby dislocating a large swath of the population, but their answer, to ship a number of the dispossessed off to the new colony of Georgia would be fraught with problems from the beginning. The early settlers, having freed themselves from the yoke of British control were reluctant to follow the demands of those the British had placed in power in the new colony. The Georgia Trustees expected the same sort of British social system to evolve in early Georgia, but being so far from any centralized government led to a sort of frontier mentality. No longer satisfied with being at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, and willing to hold out for higher wages, McIlvenna argues, Georgia settlers developed a class consciousness.

During the Trustee Era, McIlvenna contends, class, not race defined the early politics, economics and social structure of Georgia. In the twenty years Georgia operated as a free labor economy, the South Carolina planter aristocracy would wage a political war, using race as their weapon to force slavery into Georgia, but class was the driving force during the Trustee era. The Trustees were firmly against the establishment of slavery as it was contrary to their idealized vision for the colony, which was the uplift of the poor through hard work. Slavery would undercut that whole system, and drive out working class whites. The settlers of early Georgia endured great hardships, including disease, drought, war, poor harvests, and food shortages, and the Malcontents used these “failures” as an argument for the establishment of slavery. The Trustees fought against it but ultimately with James Oglethorpe no longer invested in the colony, and Parliament unwilling to fund it, Georgia succumbed to slavery, ending the first experiment of its kind in Colonial America.

The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South is social history at its finest, and certainly the first book of its kind to point a lens at the complex political, social and economic climate that marked early free Georgia.

PROGRAMMING

Thursday, April 21 @ 6:00 pm
Love Framed in Black and White: A Powerful Study in Love, Race and Courage
Paula C. Wright, a descendent of the Edgefield, South Carolina Ramey family inherited at the time of her grandmother’s death a genealogical treasure, a box filled with over 500 photographs documenting eight generations of her family. Since childhood, Ms. Wright has been interested in her incredible family story, but with the gift of the photographs she knew that the story needed to be told to the wider world. Please join us in the auditorium of Augusta Public Library on the evening of Thursday, April 21 as Ms. Wright unravels the story of the courageous marriage in 1872 of her white, third great-grandfather Judge William Ramey to former Edgefield slave, Kittie Simpkins; and the generations which followed, including those who made their homes in Augusta, Georgia. This event is free and open to the public. Please call 706-826-1511 for details.

Tuesday, April 26 @ 10:30 am
Preserving Your Family Heirlooms
In celebration of American Library Association’s Preservation Week, April 24-April 30, the Georgia Heritage Room welcomes Lauren Virgo, Registrar for the Augusta Museum of History. Ms. Virgo will teach us tricks of the trade for protecting our family treasures from the deleterious effects of light, dust, insects, and aging. Items discussed will be documents such as letters and diaries; photographs and scrapbooks; and textiles, such as quilts and vintage clothes. By learning simple preservation techniques our family heirlooms can be saved for generations to come. Please call the Georgia Heritage Room for details, 706-826-1511.

EXHIBIT

Love Framed in Black & White: A Powerful Study in Love, Race and Courage

“I can recall as a child being drawn to my great-grandmother’s photo albums. Something about the older photos would captivate me… not realizing they would speak out to me over 40 years later, their story wanting to be told.” –Paula C. Wright.

Please visit the Georgia Heritage Room on the third floor of the Augusta Public Library during the months of April and May to view this powerful exhibit of photographs, documents, and artifacts following eight generations of Paula C. Wright’s family from the marriage of her white third great-grandfather, Judge William Ramey, to former Edgefield slave, Kittie Simpkins, to the later generations of ancestors who made Augusta, Georgia their home.

“The more I tell the story, the more I realize how much of a social impact it can have in today’s society; how their legacy of love and courage really is an example of how we should live our lives…today.” –Paula C. Wright

Augusta University Libraries will host the program “The Great Conflagration: Remembering Augusta’s 1916 Fire”

Join the AU Libraries as we remember the 100th Anniversary of the 1916 Augusta Fire on March 22, Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. in the Reese Library lobby. Mr. Erick Montgomery, executive director of Historic Augusta, will speak on St. Paul’s Church and the 1916
fire.

The Reading Nook area of the library lobby will host recordings by firefighter Henry H. Johnson recounting his experiences fighting the 1916 fire. The recordings will play at intervals throughout the day between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. on March 22.

For more information, please contact the Special Collections & Institutional Archive department at 706-667-4904.

Wednesday, March 16 @ 2:00 pm
The Secret Lives of Women: Researching Female Ancestors Using the Sources They Left Behind
How do you research the women in your family? In some of the same ways you research men but you also have to consider what documents and items were left behind by women. In honor of Women’s History Month, the Georgia Heritage Room will host this free Legacy Family Tree Webinar with genealogist and women’s history scholar, Ms. Gena Philibert-Ortega. This lecture will go over the specific heirlooms women left behind including signature quilts, community cookbooks, journals and diaries. The Webinar will take place in the computer lab on the third floor of the Augusta Public Library at 823 Telfair Street. As space is limited please call 706-826-1511 to register.