{"id":502,"date":"2009-10-18T07:00:48","date_gmt":"2009-10-18T12:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wessyngton.com\/blog\/?p=502"},"modified":"2009-10-13T19:57:33","modified_gmt":"2009-10-14T00:57:33","slug":"oral-history-key-to-tracing-african-american-roots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wessyngton.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/oral-history-key-to-tracing-african-american-roots\/","title":{"rendered":"Oral History Key to Tracing African American Roots"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Joseph<\/a>

Joseph Washington 1895-2002<\/p><\/div>\n

In more than thirty years of researching my ancestry and the lives of African Americans enslaved on Wessyngton Plantation, I have had the honor of interviewing more than twenty individuals whose parents or grandparents lived on the plantation.\u00a0 <\/span>These individuals ranged in age from eighty to 107 years old.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although I found hundreds of documents about my ancestors from plantation records written by the owners of Wessyngton, I learned many personal things about my ancestors from conducting interviews with elder family members.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In 1994, I visited\u00a0my cousin Joseph Washington 1895-2002 (pictured above) at his home in Mansfield, Ohio\u00a0on his one hundred second birthday.\u00a0 <\/span>As a child Joseph lived next door to my great-great-grandparents Emanuel and Henny Washington who were born at Wessyngton in the early 1800s.\u00a0 <\/span>He related many stories about them to me including ghost stories that my great-great-grandfather used to tell all the children on the plantation and songs he used to sing.\u00a0 <\/span>Joseph told me what life was like on the plantation when he grew up there and how many people on the plantation were related to one another.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oral history is a vital key to tracing African American genealogy and \u00a0<\/span>provides many details about our ancestors that can\u2019t be found in records.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In more than thirty years of researching my ancestry and the lives of African Americans enslaved on Wessyngton Plantation, I have had the honor of interviewing more than twenty individuals whose parents or grandparents lived on the plantation.\u00a0 These individuals ranged in age from eighty to 107 years old. Although I found hundreds of documents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,19,21,20,22],"tags":[10,289,24,254,12,573,44,288,575,34,287,290,45,291,9,8],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wessyngton.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wessyngton.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wessyngton.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wessyngton.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wessyngton.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wessyngton.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":515,"href":"https:\/\/www.wessyngton.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions\/515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wessyngton.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wessyngton.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wessyngton.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}