Day 8 - Starting the Book of Life

Excerpt from Booker T. Washington's Book

Today we started the morning by watching two episodes of Finding Your Roots. The first episode we watched featured the comedians Jimmy Kimmel, Norman Lear, and Bill Hader. Henry Louis Gates Jr. took each one of the guests on a journey to learn about their European ancestors and their achievements. The second episode featured the stars Amy Schumer, Aziz Ansari, and Maya Rudolph. In this episode, the guests learned about the hardships their ancestors had to face growing up. This episode also ended with a surprising plot twist when Amy Schumer found out that she shared DNA with Henry Louis Gates Jr. Along with watching two episodes of Finding Your Roots we continued to do some historical context research about the people we chose to highlight in our Books of Life. While I was doing this research I discovered two interesting things. The first thing I found was that my fourth great uncle was talked about in a book by Booker T. Washington. The other thing I found was a deed that listed my fifth great-grandmother as the purchaser of some land. I found this particularly interesting because when she bought this land it was very uncommon for a married woman to be listed as the purchaser of land.

Students cutting out their images

Our original plan for this morning was to start adding pictures and documents to our Books of Life, but unfortunately, the printer was broken. Luckily, in the afternoon the printer was fixed and I was able to have my images printed out so that I could start planning out how I wanted to organize my Book of Life. Since most of the people, I decided to highlight emigrated to the U.S a lot of the images I printed out were Ship Passenger lists and Naturalization documents. I also printed out images of the people and a WWII registration card. Towards the end of the afternoon, I started adding some of my images to my Book of Life.

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Day 6 - A Search for Answers

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"Finding Your Roots" Genealogy J-Term 2022

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