Sankofa: Tracing Lineage, A Genealogy Workshop

Sankofa — the Akan principle of reaching back to reclaim what was lost in order to move forward — is the foundation of this program. This workshop asks a direct question: Do you know how to find your people in the record?

This three-hour working session is not a lecture. It is a guided research practicum for anyone who has hit a wall in their family history — or who has never started and doesn't know where to begin.

What you will do:

Working alongside three researchers, you will learn to read the documents that hold your family's story — even when those documents were never designed to include you. You will work with real primary sources across three distinct disciplines: visual evidence, archival methodology, and living media. You will develop a research framework for your own family and leave with a method you can apply independently.

Your facilitators:

Angelia Jones is a researcher, author, and the steward of a 50-year-old Southwest Georgia Black-owned newspaper that exists in fragile physical form with no institutional safety net beneath it. Her section brings participants into direct contact with living archives — the newspapers, community publications, and self-documented records that Black communities created precisely because official institutions wouldn't. She teaches participants how to find, read, and use media records that most genealogists overlook entirely.

Ashleigh Oatts is the Curator at the T.R.R. Cobb House Museum and the researcher currently building a database of enslaved people connected to Athens families — recovering names, relationships, and lineages one document at a time. She brings active, place-based methodology to the hardest sources: deeds, tax digests, estate inventories, and church registers created by people who held power over the people you are trying to find.

Sidney Pettice is an art historian, curator, and scholar whose work centers the African diaspora and the cultural record Black artists have kept alive across generations. Her section opens the workshop by teaching participants to read visual evidence as archival material — because not every record is written, and not every archive is a file.

Together, these three sections form a complete research framework: the visual record, the institutional record, and the community record. By the end of the morning, you will know how to move across all three.

Capacity is limited to 20 participants. This is an intentional working session, not a presentation. Reserve your seat now.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher Taylor-Grady House at Landmark Commons