nlintheusa.com
Thanks for a great discussion yesterday on our monthly phone call. It was truly enlightening. For those who were not able to attend, our speaker this month was Debra B Sloan. She is involved in several projects including the Black Liberators Project (http://nlintheusa.com/black-liberators-project/) which collects stories about the black soldiers who liberated the Netherlands. Another project she has is the Equal Justice Initiative which collects and memorializes the victims of racial violence and injustice (https://eji.org/projects/community-remembrance-project/).
I realize that the vast majority of my work is Euro-centric. I have only had a few opportunities to work on genealogy projects for people of color but those have been great experiences. We need to think about how we interact with these underserved communities and make an effort to involve them. One thing we talked about was the development of a community action plan where we talk about including these communities in family history as a way of learning and healing within our communities. I have a small start of one which we began working on last year but I believe we need to go back and move that forward. This weekend I will try to gather those thoughts and provide a skeleton plan for the group to discuss in more detail.
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I also really appreciated yesterday's on line discussion, and wanted to share what came of it from one almost off-hand remark during the discussion.
@Janell Vasquez happened to make a comment about some PhD at a university in Auburn, Alabama, that had done some nice work in the area of our discussion. Auburn happens to be in our stake, so I privately texted her in the middle of the meeting and asked if she knew the name of the PhD (it would of course be Auburn University), just in case a connection might be made at my end. Our stake president happens to also be an Auburn University professor, and as a previous chairman of his department, is obviously well connected there. She wrote back the name, and I instantly recognized the last name of someone I knew from our stake (I'd met him on a visit over to the branch chapel in Auburn a couple of years ago or so). I figured perhaps, by some chance, the PhD might be his father (the person I know is only in his early 30s, I'd guess).
I called and left a message for him, and got a response a few minutes later. He'd JUST gotten his phone fixed after 9 days of no activity, and if I'd left a message just one day earlier, he'd never have gotten it. And to my amazement, the PhD is him! He never mentioned when I first met him that he was working on his PhD at the time, and it's never come up the few times I've seen him at stake meetings since. What ensued was a 1-hour conversation about his work. I told him about our group discussion yesterday morning, and he found reference to it. It ALSO turns out that our speaker, Debra Sloan, has her Sloan relatives concentrated in both the same area AND era as the PhD's family in Texas, so he's going to contact her both about her similar interests in identifying and maintaining African American grave sites as well as a potential personal family connection.
---- All that from a brief, no-name comment by Janell in the middle of a much larger discussion! As I emailed Janell about the outcome of her "little" comment, I mentioned a sign I saw on a Protestant church once: "Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous." We started that meeting yesterday with a prayer, asking for guidance in what we do, and we got that wonderful "coincidental" remark that allowed me to connect with someone I already knew just somewhat casually in my own stake, only to find out there is much more there than I had any idea. And through that connection, it also led to a potential family connection for him as well with our guest speaker yesterday!
THAT is what this group is all about - connections! Thanks to @Heather R Jacobs and whoever else helped create not only this discussion group, but also the on line monthly meetings. "Little" miracles have already happened, and will continue. We just need to seize the "little" opportunities to make those connections.
--Chris
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I agree, it was a great conversation at the right time. My wheels are turning but I'm not quite sure where they are going yet.
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