Beyond Basics: Taking Family Research to the Next Step

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.

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Researching Your War of 1812 Ancestor

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.War of 1812 draft

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Preserving your Family Heirlooms

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.

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Getting Started Researching your Jewish Ancestors

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.Jewish Ancestry flyer

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The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South

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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.

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April 2016 Georgia Room Programming and Exhibits

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

 

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The Great Conflagration: Remembering Augusta’s 1916 Fire

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.

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March 2016 Georgia Room Programming

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.

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Georgia Girl: A Grandmother’s Place in History by David Henry Gambrell

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For many, there is “a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage – to know who we are and where we have come from.” (Alex Haley, author of Roots). For David Henry Gambrell, this was true. Armed with family lore, a previously published work from another ancestor and the copy of a painting that once hung in the drawing room of another relative’s home on the Hawaiian Islands, Gambrell sets out to discover more about his relatively unknown fourth great-grandmother, Ann (Grace) Lartigue. In his work, Gambrell invites the reader to sit down and hear the story of “our Grandmother Ann” who lived in “the late 1700s and early 1800s” (pg. 5).
Mr. Gambrell’s experiences as a lawyer stand him in good stead as he weaves the tale of his grandmother and the world in which she lived. Notable figures such as Sam Houston, President Andrew Jackson, Napoleon Bonaparte and Toussaint Louverture make their appearances throughout the novel as the author paints a broad picture of the turbulent times of revolution (for Americans, French and Haitians) and the struggle to adapt to a rapidly expanding world. Directly or indirectly, Gambrell demonstrates how each of these prominent figures played a part in shaping his ancestor’s life and driving her and her family to live in the growing cosmopolitan city of Augusta, Georgia.
Each chapter of the book (with the exception of the first, which describes the development of Augusta) focuses on an ancestor related to either Ann herself or her husband, Gerard Lartigue. Every chapter gives interesting accounts of the lives and circumstances of the individuals depicted and how they relate back to Ann. Unfortunately, the author does not cite his sources, claiming that he “is no scholar” and that the insertion of footnotes “interrupts the flow of the story” (pg 5). At the end of each chapter, Mr. Gambrell does include some endnotes which offer the reader the opportunity to investigate some of his assertions and verify the facts that he presented. The final chapter focuses, at last, on Ann herself, the events at the conclusion of her life
and what became of some of her progeny.
David Gambrell’s book is less a family history of he-begets-him and more of a social commentary on the development of the Southern United States in which members of his family just happen to play a part. Gambrell states that the story of his grandmother could be the story of anyone’s family (pg 5) and this would certainly seem to be the case if one had ancestors in the South. However, one would need to read the whole book to see if those ancestors had any connection to the Lartigue family enough to warrant a mention in this narrative.

Georgia Girl: A Grandmother’s Place in History. By David Henry Gambrell. Published by Gateway Press, Inc; Maryland; 2003. 386 pp. Maps, charts, photographs, index. Hardback. Out of print. Used $17.99 and up.  A copy is available in the GA Heritage Room of the Augusta-Richmond County Public Library.

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Love Framed in Black and White

The Georgia Heritage Room is honored to annouce that Ms. Paula C. Wright will be here on Thursday, April 21st at 6:00 pm to present:

LOVE FRAMED IN BLACK & 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 seven 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, Kitty Simpkins; and the generations which followed, including those who made their homes in Augusta, Georgia. Many of the photographs Ms. Wright inherited will be featured in an exhibit which will run through the month of April. The exhibit will be in the Georgia Heritage Room on the third floor of the Augusta Public Library. This program is free and open to the public. Please call 706-826-1511 for details.

Below is a link to a recent article about Paula C. Wright in the ROCKDALE CITIZEN

http://www.rockdalecitizen.com/features/genealogy-presentation-delves-into-how-interracial-couple-coped-after-civil/article_c9df4563-93b0-510e-b8ef-e408da5ef1ef.html

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