drive.google.com
A huge "Thank You" to Debra Blacklock-Sloan who was our guest speaker this last Thursday, 4 June 2020. During this time in our history, this meeting was a powerful message about "Telling our Stories. Educating each other. Finding Healing Together." Usually I give a brief synopsis of the meeting notes, but I could not do the meeting justice with a few simple lines, so I am including the Google Docs link to the full meeting notes. There are so many extra links in the notes as well that will provide hours of education for you. Enjoy!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14bIjSjNn6Bf9UgPcXzkCaJHf_cgErgO0/view?usp=sharing
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@Heather R Jacobs Thanks so much for taking all the time it had to have taken to compile (and apparently even transcribe) all that. Outstanding "summary" (and then some)!
I mentioned in a separate post that I recognized the name "Bubb" and wondered if the Dr. Robert Bubb at Auburn University (Alabama) might happen to be the father of a fairly young man I know from my own stake (I'm over in the Georgia half of the stake so I don't see him very often). I called him and it turns out HE is Dr. Bubb! When I first met him in Auburn a few years ago, he never mentioned he was actually working on his PhD at the time, and the subject of family history never came up. So I had no idea he was now Dr. Bubb, not just "Rob." His department has actually allowed him to allocate 25% of his time to this particular project area. What a wonderful "unknown" contact within my own stake with someone I already knew at least casually. Thanks to an almost off-hand remark by one of he participants about him, one of those "coincidences" occurred that allowed an additional connection.
But it got even better. I had told him about The Bridge meeting, and he contacted me later in the day. He'd located a reference to it and information about Debra Blacklock-Sloan. It turns out her Sloan family is largely from not only the same area in Texas as some of his Sloan family, but also from the same time period as well. So he's got a potential link he never had before - again, all because of a "coincidental" one-on-one connection in a conversation by people he didn't even know were talking together that day.
As a sign in front of a Protestant church said a while back, "Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous." Sometimes we miss what's actually coming our way, or dismiss it as inconsequential. The one-on-one connections are essential to this work, and it will spread.
--Chris
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@Chris Schmink My goodness, that is absolutely fabulous! Thank you so much for sharing all the connections, and what has happened since Thursday!
We have had some great family discussions this weekend because of Debra. I am so grateful for our meeting.
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Dear Myrtle had a blog back in 2014 challenging individuals, societies and conference committees to reach out to people of color. It has some great recommendations. https://blog.dearmyrtle.com/2014/12/building-community-call-to-action-whats.html. Also, I mentioned our June meeting to Pat Richley-Erickson (Dear Myrtle) and she would like to view the recording of our meeting if possible. @Heather R Jacobs is this something that we can provide a link to?
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@Miles A Meyer Thank you so much for the Dear Myrtle link! I am so glad that she is interested in the meeting that we had. It truly was a great meeting. I will email you the video link, and you can also send her the notes that are at the top of this link as it is filled with all sorts of information.
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This group is doing exactly what it's designed to do - helping people connect within various "communities." I love it! What a great connection now with "Dear Myrtle" as a result - all because of a few people getting together, talking about various things, and suddenly those experiences of others later become a way of connecting with others to enhance this work.
Just a short while ago I had another wonderful start to something that may hopefully turn into a wonderful project. We have a fairly recent member of our ward who is Native American. He is highly educated generally, but also particularly in Native American history, both for his own tribe, as well as many others. He knows more about Native American history than anyone I've personally previously met. We talk about Native American issues from time to time since he found out I have a particular personal interest despite no known Native American ancestry myself. After or ward's bi-weekly Sunday discussion group this morning, he called and asked what it would take to get indexing done of Native American enrollment records. It expanded into a great discussion that included some things from our on line group discussion two months back concerning records pertaining to African Americans that a group was able to do a closed (private?) indexing project for, with only Americans of African descent participating in the indexing. Had I not been part of that group, I never would have known that closed indexing projects can be done.
My friend has told me how protective tribes are of their records, and how understandable it is that they're distrustful of others even accessing their records in some cases. He has unique access to over 200 tribal contacts, and a personal background to be listened to, and is willing to use that to try to get more access to records so they can be digitized and become searchable as part of an effort to preserve tribal integrity, history, and even languages. And because of that one on line group meeting I was able to provide him some history of efforts similar to what he was roughly envisioning, giving him both hope and actual ideas. Again, it's an idea shared here and there, seemingly somewhat insignificant at the time, that can lead to expansion of that idea in ways nobody had thought about before - just like @Janell Vasquez Janell's offhand remark about some professor at Auburn University and his African American great grandmother leading to a great discovery of a resource right within my own stake.
This group is great! Thanks to all who add to it - I've certainly been blessed, and also been able to help expand the work with others as a result. Who knows how much good can come because of @Miles A Meyer getting that information to Pat Richley-Erickson (Dear Myrtle)?!
(@Heather R Jacobs I'm separately messaging you for a contact person regarding the African American indexing project. Please let me know if you don't get it.)
--Chris
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