AFRICAN AMERICANS COLONIZED LIBERIA
(Please be aware this post was written in 2003 and published at that time in the Houston Chronicle (Houston, Texas) newspaper. Some of the news in this post, therefore, may not be current. Current and future posts on this blog may revisit and update news on this and other posts on this blog. If you have questions and/or suggestions, please send Mic a note using the comment page -Don’t forget to use the orange “subscribe” button to receive new posts-Thanks, Mic)
During the Eighteenth Century people realized there was a growing problem as more and more slaves were manumitted with no sound provisions anywhere in the United States for them to be integrated into society on an equal basis with whites.
In 1817 Robert Finley organized the American Colonization Society in Washington, DC . The ACS was formed principally to transport willing freed African Americans in the United States to Africa where they could establish an independent democratic colony for themselves. The society had many well known members including Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, Bushrod Washington, Henry Clay and Francis Scott Key.
Importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited by the U.S. Congress in 1808 and in 1819 the Federal government appropriated $100,000 to relocate in Africa those Africans who had been brought into the United States illegally. In 1821 the ACS and other societies began purchasing land in northwest Africa that became the Liberian colonization region. By 1867 the ACS had settled over 13,000 African Americans in Africa and other societies had sponsored like numbers.
In 1847 the Quaker Young Men’s Colonization Society of Pennsylvania, The Virginia Colonial Society and the ACS merged their resources to form what became the independent nation of Liberia.
To learn more about Liberia, the American Colonization Society and other societies that settled Liberia, visit to the Library of Congress’s History of Liberia Timeline website at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/libhtml/liberia.html
HUMPHREY ADDRESSES DGS
John T. Humphrey, Director of the National Genealogical Society Learning Center and author of nineteen books, will be the first featured speaker at the Dallas Genealogical Society’s 2003 Lecture Series.
Humphrey’s topics will include Reconstructing Families on the Colonial Frontier; Researching Eighteenth Century Germans, Researching Pennsylvania Ancestors and Essentials of Documentation.
The lecture will be held Saturday February 1 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the auditorium of the Downtown Dallas Public Library at 1515 Young Street. For more information contact DGS at info@dallasgenealogy.org , by voice mail at 469-948-1106 or visit their website at http://dallasgenealogy.org .
FORT BEND VISITS LDS FHC
The Fort Bend Genealogical Society will meet Saturday January 18 at 10:00 a.m. at the Family History Center, Church of the Latter Day Saints, 602 Eldridge Road, Sugar Land, Texas. The Director of the Family History Center, Harriet Ramussen will give a tour of the center, speak on the resources of FHCs and explain how to access information from one’s home computer. For more information about the tour or about the society call Merle Smithers at 281-242-7927.
BOOKSHELF NEWS
Houston residents Frank Carter Smith and Emily Anne Croom have composed a book everyone interested in conducting African American research will want. A Genealogist’s Guide to Discovering Your African American Ancestors: How to Find and Record Your Unique Heritage is available for $21.99 from the publisher F&W Publications at 800-289-0963.
The book discuses how to begin one’s quest to document the names and lives of one’s African American ancestors including gathering oral and social history within the family: researching census records, particularly the 1870 Federal Census; and African American specific resources such as Freedman’s Bureau Records.
In addition the book includes case studies tracing actual families in various regions of the United States; methods for researching slavery-era records; tactics for identifying an ancestor’s slaveholder and researching slaveholding families.
