Melungeon Historical Society Elections

The newly elected Melungeon Historical Society officer for the year beginning May 1, 2010 are:

Jack Goins, President
Penny Ferguson, Vice-President for Research
Dr. Jill Florence Lackey, Vice-President for Heritage
Becky Nelson, Secretary/Treasurer

Also, Connie Barber and David Gibson were elected to one-year terms as as at-large members of the MHS Board of Directors.

While other officers were re-elected to their positions, this is the first time Dr. Lackey has served as an MHS officer.

Dr. Lackey holds a doctorate degree in cultural anthropology. She recently retired from teaching anthropology and research methods at Marquette University. In addition to teaching, Dr. Lackey has founded and directed three organizations. The first, Repairers of the Breach, is a homeless self-help agency that today serves over 200 homeless individuals a day. The second, Jill Florence Lackey & Associates, is a research agency that conducted over 60 program evaluations and studies. One of the JFL projects was to create a curriculum on research methodology for the Centers for Disease Control that could be used by CDC scholars (this is online under the name of Delve!). The third organization, Urban Anthropology Inc., studies city cultures in Southeast Wisconsin and from these produces ethnic programs, documentaries, and tours.

Dr. Lackey is the author of The Culture of the Paper Program and over 20 peer reviewed articles. Her upcoming book is Ethnicity in the 21st Century. Dr. Lackey has also produced, directed, and edited 15 documentaries on Southeast Wisconsin ethnic groups.

Dr. Lackey has a group of family ties to East Tennessee (Hawkins/Hancock Counties and adjoining counties). These include the Alexanders, Lackeys, Cates, and Binghams. Her Moore and Cates lines were also in Melungeon progenitor areas of Orange Co., North Carolina in the mid-1700s.

Tennessee Historians Search For Civil War Relics

By Blake Farmer
Vermont Public Radio

Bob Duncan hands a weathered three-foot sword to Tennessee archivist Wayne Moore.

Moore handles the weapon with white cotton gloves. "What information do you have about it, Bob?" Moore asks.

"It was captured in Tennessee during the war, taken back home to Wisconsin, hung on the mantle for umpteen years," Duncan says. "A friend of mine bought it from the family. And I went to see him and he said, 'Here, I've got something for you. Let this go back to Tennessee.'"

Moore concludes that the artifact is probably a cavalry saber. It will get photographed from every angle -- including close-ups of its ornate handle, which would have guarded a Confederate soldier's hand.

In downtown Columbia, about an hour south of Nashville, Moore is at the first stop of a multi-year Civil War memorabilia tour. Tennessee archivists are trying to beef up the state's library of Civil War documentation by asking people to dust off their brass buttons, old family photos and handwritten letters that have survived from the 1860s.

State historians plan to hit every county in Tennessee as part of an effort to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

To continue reading: Click Here.

10th Annual Genealogy Book Fair Tazewell, Tennessee

May 15, 2010

The Genealogy Book Shoppe
261 Kyle Lane
Tazewell, Tn 37879

The MHS's Johnnie Rhea will be there, to discuss the Gibson and Collins families, as will 1400 books on various genealogical topics.

For more information call: 423-869-9580 or 423-489-4042

Federation of Genealogical Societies to Digitize War of 1812 Pension Files

Courtesy of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

The following announcement was written by the Federation of Genealogical Societies:

SALT LAKE CITY — With the approaching bicentennial of the War of 1812, the Federation of Genealogical Societies, a non-profit genealogical organization headquartered in Austin, Texas, is pleased to announce a national fundraising initiative to raise $3.7 million to digitize of the War of 1812 pension files. The digitization process will enable online access by historians and family researchers to the memories and biographies of those who fought to protect our nation’s independence. This announcement is being made at the start of the National Genealogical Society’s 2010 conference, an event that will draw more than two thousand genealogists to Salt Lake City, Utah.

The War of 1812, often referred to as America’s second war for independence, significantly shaped this country’s identity both internationally and domestically. Many remember the War of 1812 as the war that give us the “Star-Spangled Banner” and the burning of the White House. Some of the great leaders of our country, including three presidents, took part in this conflict. Nearly 300,000 men served, including members of at least eighteen Native American tribes.

The pension records for the War of 1812 consist of more than 7.2 million documents in 180,000 files. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) receives more than three thousand requests per year for War of 1812 pensions, placing them among the most requested sets of records. Digitizing these valuable records will preserve the originals by removing them from continued heavy use. It will also make the images of the records much more widely available. NARA reports these important historical records already have been conserved and readied for digitization, so scanning could start as soon as funds are received. With the cost for digitizing and saving a single page from a pension file being fifty cents, supporters will see progress from the earliest days of the fundraising initiative.

Genealogists, historians, and scholars of military history have long appreciated the value of pension files. A typical pension file may contain documents that describe a veteran’s service as well as why he, his widow, or his dependents qualify for a pension. In the cases of widows’ and dependents’ filings, there are typically a number of documents proving the claimant is related to the veteran. The testimony of a veteran’s comrades can provide unique and valuable data on what military life entailed, the rigors of everyday camp life, and details of particular skirmishes and battles. One may discover numerous details of an ancestor’s life in these pension files, some of which may be many dozens of pages long.

The Federation of Genealogical Societies is committed to projects that link the genealogical community and advance the cause of preserving records and making them more accessible. The Federation will be working with the genealogical and historical societies nation-wide, particularly in states where War of 1812 activities took place, as well as the many War of 1812 societies and bicentennial commissions, to raise awareness about this vital preservation and access project and to raise the funds necessary to complete the project.

Those interested in contributing to the Preserve the Pensions! Project or wanting additional information should contact the Federation of Genealogical Societies via their website at www.fgs.org/1812, or contact Curt Witcher at 260-421-1226 or 1812@FGS.org.

The Lumbee Indians: An Annotated Bibliography

Welcome to The Lumbee Indians: An Annotated Bibliography, a site designed to provide a comprehensive, scholarly, online resource for information on the Lumbee Indians and related topics.

The Lumbee tribe, with 53,800 enrolled members, was in the early 2000s the largest of North Carolina’s American Indian groups and the ninth-largest tribe in the United States. The Lumbee have been identified by a number of names during the history of their official relationship with the state of North Carolina. Native historians believe that the modern tribal name originates from the Lumber River, which traverses Robeson County and is an important historical, cultural, and spiritual symbol for many tribal members. Most Lumbees live in Robeson County and the adjacent counties of Cumberland, Hoke, and Scotland, and these counties are considered by the Lumbee Tribal Council to be the tribe’s home territory, although there are also sizable communities of Lumbee people in Greensboro and elsewhere. Some Lumbees resided in the Bulloch County, Ga., area from 1890 through 1920. The Robeson County communities of Pembroke, Prospect, Union Chapel, Fairgrove, and Magnolia have long been predominantly Lumbee.

To visit the online bibliography: Click Here.

Discover Tennesse Trails & Byways

Venture forth...

Wander your passion through the trails of Tennessee, be it an historic town square, an idyllic nature or a trek to one of the Volunteer State's inimitable distilleries, all are steeped in legend, each one a gold mine of exploration.

This is a highly interactive providing maps, itineraries and travel information for a large number of Tennessee trails and byways. Downloaded high resolution maps and brochures are available in PDF format, but a PDF reader is not required to use the site online.

To visit: Click Here.

American Museum of Science & Energy

Oak Ridge, Tennessee

In its halcyon, pro-nuke buzz days, it was called the American Museum of Atomic Energy. Visitors were encouraged to have their dimes turned into "atomic dimes" -- irradiated in a special "isotope cabinet." But the museum stopped that after 1968, and changed its name in 1978.

Since then the AMSE has had to please two different camps, one wanting to celebrate America's nuclear prowess and the other wanting to stick it in a dark corner somewhere and celebrate biodiesel and wind turbines. This creates odd juxtapositions and omissions. A life-size replica of the Hiroshima bomb hangs next to a sign that reads, "Protecting Employees and Community."

Atomic stuff is still here, but so are solar panels on the museum's roof ("One of the largest solar power arrays in the Southeast."). There's a big exhibit on Einstein ("he laid the groundwork for splitting atoms") and the letter that he wrote to President Roosevelt in 1939, urging development of atomic fission -- but no mention of his equally urgent letter of 1945, begging FDR to stop.

Oak Ridge was born in 1942, when the U.S. government told the people who lived in these hills and hollows to pack up and get out. Their small farms were replaced by a gigantic industrial complex that refined useless uranium 238 into fissionable uranium 235 -- the explosive that packed the bomb that vaporized Hiroshima.

To continue reading: Click Here.

Note: I am blogging this review mainly because I visited this museum when I was twelve and it was still called the American Museum of Atomic Energy, and I received one of the irradiated dimes mentioned above. I was much impressed with it at the time, and it seems from the review that it was a better, and certainly better focused, museum in those days than it is now. But the story of the residents displaced by the atomic plants and the locals who worked in them is relevant to the story of Southern Appalachia.

A Technical Note: Uranium 238 is not "refined" into uranium 235. Uranium as it occurs naturally contains both isotopes and the fissionable uranium 235 was extracted from uranium ore in the Oak Ridge atomic plants. Also, uranium 238 is far from useless: It can be transformed into fissionable plutonium through bombardment by neutrons in a breeder reactor. Both approaches were used successfully by the Manhattan Project to create atomic bombs near the end of World War II, the one dropped on Hiroshima having been a uranium 235 bomb and that dropped on Nagasaki a plutonium bomb. Yes, I know, that's more than you ever wanted to know about that!