In the Telling

In this episode, genealogist Bernice Alexander Bennett shares information about the Homestead Act of 1862, and why it's critical that African Americans know about the Homestead Act when researching their ancestry. If your family was listed as a farmer, Bennett says, it's important to check the Homestead Act records to see if your ancestors participated in this program. Bennett advises that, "you have to understand [that] while we identify the land, and we tell the story, there is also more to the story and that’s what happened to the land." 

Bernice Alexander Bennett is an award-winning author, genealogist, nationally recognized guest speaker, storyteller, and producer-host of the popular Research at the National Archives and Beyond BlogTalkRadio program. She is also the first recipient of the Ida B. Wells Service Award given by the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage for her dedication to broadcast stories about enslaved and indentured ancestors of African descent. She also received the Elizabeth Clark-Lewis Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS) Genealogy Award in 2019 for original research in support of African American Genealogy. Bennett is on the Board of Directors for the National Genealogical Society and one of the founder’s of the Midwest African American Genealogy Institute,

Bennett--a New Orleans native and current resident in Maryland--enjoyed a 35-year career in domestic and international public health. She received an undergraduate degree from Grambling State University and a graduate degree in Public Health from the University of Michigan.

Her genealogical research centers on Southeast Louisiana, and Edgefield and Greenwood Counties, South Carolina. Her South Carolina journey is chronicled in Our Ancestors, Our Stories, which won the 2018 International AAHGS Book award for Non-Fiction Short Stories. Her second book Tracing Their Steps - A Memoir received the Phillis Wheatley Literary Award from the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage in 2019; the International AAHGS Book Award in 2020 for Non-Fiction Short Story and, the Next Generations Indie Award in 2021 for African American Non-Fiction book category.

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Land Entry Case Files and Related Records at the National Archives

In this episode, genealogist Guy Weston falls in love with genealogy while researching 19th-century plot records purchased by his great, great, great, great grandfather on his mother's side. He learned the names of his ancestors and their descendants, fueling his obsession with genealogy. Guy’s mother initially thought she inherited this property when a cousin gave her the deed. However, they quickly learned it also belonged to several distant cousins, as new deeds were not executed over the years as one generation died and passed it on to the next. Guy’s introduction to genealogy was searching microfilm to look for these potential heirs.

In her In the Telling conversation, LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson talks about the mystical aspect of doing genealogy: how the ancestors seem to guide you in uncovering their stories. 

LaBrenda is a trustee and President of the Board for Certification of Genealogists. She also serves as the Registrar General of the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage, a lineage society that honors ancestors who were enslaved in the United States. LaBrenda earned a BA from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and both a Law degree and a Master of Laws degree from the New York University School of Law. After working as a corporate tax attorney for thirty-five years, she retired in 2013 and turned her attention to her longtime avocation of Genealogy. She is now a full-time genealogist focused on writing and teaching at National institutes and conferences. Her 2016 guide to researching in her SC home county was hailed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a model for research in SC and other states. 

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In this episode, Deborah Robinson talks about Bob Robinson, her great-great-grandfather, who was born on Edisto Island, Charleston County, SC, and the land she inherited from him.

Deborah Robinson has been a genealogist for more than 25 years. Born in Harlem and raised in the Bronx, Deborah's specialty is African American research in the southeastern United States, particularly the Gullah/Geechee culture of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Deborah holds certificates from the Boston University Center for Professional Education in Genealogical Research and the Professional Genealogy (ProGen) Study Program. 

She also holds a bachelor’s degree in speech communications from Syracuse University. Deborah has worked as a Research Manager at Ancestry.com's ProGenealogists division and is currently the 2nd Vice President and Webmaster for the Jean Sampson Scott Greater New York Chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society. 

Music by Sean Bempong.

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On the season finale of In the Telling, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor shares poems and memories from her recent book of poetry, Mama Phife Represents, honoring her son, Hip-Hop Legend, Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest aka Malik Taylor.

Mama Phife Represents is a verse memoir of a poet, mother and teaching artist who suddenly loses her son to type 1 diabetes. It is a story of loss, love, and courage.

Boyce-Taylor’s work has appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Chicago Review of Books. She holds an MFA in creative writing/poetry from Stonecoast/The University of Southern Maine. Cheryl is the author of several books including Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows, Convincing the Body, and Arrival: Poems, and the forthcoming, We Are Not Wearing Helmets: Poems (February 2022).

Odile Tevie’s love of people and their stories and connections inspire a curiosity that moves her to explore beyond the surface and cross boundaries. Born in Accra, Tevie refuses to be boxed in by anyone and embraces all the things that make and have shaped her. And for her, the voyage of discovery is a never-ending one.

Tevie is the current director and co-founder of Nubuke Foundation, a visual arts and cultural foundation based in Accra, the capital of Ghana and in outstation Wa-Upper West Region. She is a graduate of University of Ghana BA (honors) Computer Science, Mathematics. Her journey within the arts started after retiring from 10 successful years in the field of IT. After setting up Black Swan gallery in London from 2000 to 2005, her interest in artists and creative people grew. 

Under Tevie's vision and drive, Nubuke Foundation, established in 2006, has become an internationally acknowledged arts institution whose robust and engaging programming calendar has supported the career of many mid-career Ghanaian artists today. The multi-faceted programming initiatives of the Foundation can be attributed in Tevie's interests in people and her curiosity about human interactions beyond the obvious.

Ajamu is a fine art photographic artist, scholar, archive curator and radical sex activist with a 25+ year track record of exhibiting in museums, galleries and alternative spaces worldwide. He is the co-founder of the award winning rukus! Federation, the rukus! Black LGBTQ Archive, and is a leading specialist on Black queer history, heritage and cultural memory in the UK.

His philosophical-political-aesthetic includes portraiture/studio-based constructed imagery, early analogue printing processes and large format photography, which unapologetically celebrates Black queer bodies, the erotic sense[s], desire, pleasure as activism and difference. He recently made history by showing the first erect penis on British terrestrial TV in the documentary, Me and My Penis.

Dr. Edwina Ashie-Nikoi is an archivist, historian and curator of the African/Diaspora experience. Her probing of culture and history began early, constantly asking (pestering!) her bemused parents and older kinfolk about their family and Ga ethnic histories. Having connected with various strands of blackness while growing up in Dubai, studying in the US and researching in the Caribbean and UK, she continues to be fascinated personally and academically with the ways peoples of African descent document themselves. Her scholarly research engages the myriad cultural records and indigenous knowledge peoples of Africa descent create as well as the institutions and processes involved in preserving them. Edwina currently teaches at the University of Ghana (UG)’s Department of Information Studies and is editorial coordinator of UG’s Institute of African Studies' Contemporary Journal of African Studies.  On today's episode, Dr. Ashie-Nikoi shares information about Ga naming practices, which are unique in Ghana. Ga names immediately identify one's clan, one's position among siblings, possibly even one's father's position among his siblings, one's clan, and possibly one's town of origin. 

Flip Couto is the Executive director of "Aliança Pró Saúde da População Negra" (Alliance for the Health of the Black Population), founder of Collective AMEM (group of black queer artists), dancer at Sansa-croma company and member of House of Zion.

He is an HIV+ brazilian dancer, performer, cultural mischief maker and curator who interrogates, redefines and creates a diverse range of spaces and actions athwart the periphery of São Paulo culture.

As a South American gay black male who is publicly open about his HIV status, Flip uses his own body as source material. Working within and across several companies, projects, different community groups and networks both physically and on online including --art, urban spaces, dance battles, balls, performances and theatre--his practice is always searching for a transit between these spaces, which provides and provokes a creative-socio-political conversation within the gaps and silences in the Brazilian QPOC community and the wider public.

In this interview, he speaks about the value of family, his biological family, his partner, and the House of Zion. 

In this episode, librarian and genealogist Phillip Bond talks about the maternal and paternal matriarchs of his family, Venus Bond and Ella Dockery,  the impossible odds they had against them and the incredible legacy they left behind.

Phillip Bond has been working in public libraries for 15 years. Beginning his career as a public librarian for the Brooklyn Public Library, he uses the diverse backdrop of the changing Brooklyn Borough to create projects, events, and programs around archives, photography, oral histories, podcasting, and genealogy. The Milwaukee native has a personal invested interest in the research of his African American Southern roots, by way of Tennessee and Arkansas, having traced his family lineage back 6 generations to the 1700's. He currently resides in Washington DC and works as an Adult Literacy and Technology Librarian in South East DC for the DC Public Library.

Eric Darnell Pritchard is an award-winning writer, cultural critic, and an Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is also faculty at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. Eric is the author of Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy and editor of “Sartorial Politics, Intersectionality, and Queer Worldmaking,” a special issue of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. Pritchard’s writings on fashion, popular culture, literacy, rhetoric, and pedagogies have been published in multiple venues including the International Journal of Fashion Studies, Harvard Educational Review, Visual Anthropology, Literacy in Composition Studies, and ARTFORUM. Currently, he is completing two books: a historical ethnography of Black queer feminist literacy activism and a biography of 1980s international fashion superstar Patrick Kelly.

If we are fortunate, we have our biological families and our chosen families. Our history as African Americans is a complicated, often painful one. As descendants of enslaved people, we lived with the omnipresent possibility of separation through the sale of our fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers. After coming out to their family, many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people also suffered the loss of family members. This episode shares the beautiful story of Lee Levingston Perine and Patience, two queer African Americans who chose each other as family, a quality that both the Black and LGBTQ communities have been doing for centuries. 

Lee is a Washington, DC-based project manager, event planner and creative. He has planned or helped plan everything from weddings to nonprofit events to an LGBTQ+ music festival headlined by the Queen of Bounce, Big Freedia. He’s the founder of Makers Lab and his latest project is a virtual Black Pride Festival happening this May.

Patience is a creator, actress, vocalist, and writer native to Washington, D.C; a creative with a passion for the spoken word and sound healing. She is most recently recognized as the "Scat" of the Peace & Bodyroll Duo BOOMscat. Patience is an artist who creates collages for your listening pleasure. If you listen closely you may feel her heart between your ears.

Join us this episode as we speak with Katherine “Kat” Cheairs, a filmmaker, educator, curator, activist and community artist. Kat’s areas of interest and research include: HIV & AIDS; visual culture; media arts therapy; community arts; and, critical race theory in art education. Ms. Cheairs is a co-curator of Metanoia: Transformation Through AIDS Archives and Activism, an archival exhibition focusing on the contributions of Black women, transwomen of color, and women of color HIV/AIDS activists from the early 1990s to the present. Ms Cheairs is the producer and director of the documentary, Ending Silence, Shame & Stigma: HIV/AIDS in the African American Family. Kat’s new project in development, In This House, is a video installation exploring HIV/AIDS narratives through the Black body. Kat has appeared and presented on panels at the Tribeca Film Institute, BAM, Pratt Institute, The New School, New York University, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Aperture Foundation, and UnionDocs.

Kat shares her memories of visiting her maternal grandparent's home in the summer time in Memphis, Tennessee. 

Alexis De Veaux was born and raised in Harlem. She is the product of two merging streams of black history in New York City--immigrants from the Caribbean on her mother’s side and migrants from North Carolina on her father’s side who settled in Harlem in the early decades of the Twentieth Century. The second of eight children, that history was embedded in her mother’s view of life: as she would say, “you got three strikes against you. You poor, you black, and you female.” But Alexis was drawn to the world of words and books, and literature soon became the means by which she re-imagined the world her mother understood. She is the author of many books including Na-Ni, (1973); Spirits in the Street (1974); Blue Heat: A Portfolio of Poems & Drawings (1985); Don't Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday (1988) and Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (2004) and Yabo (2014).

In this episode, Alexis talks about grief and loss as emotional states impacting black family life from her point of view. 

In this episode of In the Telling, Christopher Stahling talks about his two seminal figures in his life, his grandmothers Ethel and Thelma. Both women lived together in Harlem and deeply impacted Christopher as a youngster, though differently.  Join us for enjoyable and thoughtful stories about these two special women--and learn about Chris, too!

Christopher Stahling is life coach, mixed media visual artist, caterer and healer. Native Harlemite. Have a listen. 

Follow him on IG @insatiablelion. 

In our second episode, we interview Miranda Mims, co-founder of the Nomadic Archivist Project (NAP), an initiative devoted to developing relationships and beginning conversations around preserving legacy, memory, connection, and trust in the African diaspora. She is the Special Collections Archivist for Discovery and Access and Curator of modern literature and publishers, human rights and social justice, and local LGBTQ history and culture in the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation (RBSCP) at the University of Rochester. Miranda has been actively researching her family history for the last 15 years, from reconstructing the lives of her grandmothers, Fannie Pearl Bowen and Lucella Atwater Stillwell, to her efforts in uncovering the truth about her great Grandfather, John Mims. It has been hard at times because there are so many missing records, including the 1890 census - which could have been an important piece to John's story, if it wasn't destroyed in a fire in 1921.

*After hearing this episode, my mother told me my first time involved in genealogical research was when I was a month old when she took me to a census-taking training.

Hey NAP family!

Glad you are here to join us on our very first episode of In the Telling!