CVHR February Meeting (2nd): Visualizing Emancipation (Dr. Scott Nesbit, University of Richmond)

January 9th, 2012

Scott Nesbit will talk about two attempts to use online visualization to gain a better understanding of the history of emancipation.  ”Marriage & Migration,” is a map of the cohabitation records in Virginia and was published to accompany an essay in the journal Southern Spaces. Visualizing Emancipation, to be released in February 2012, is an attempt to harvest and organize a large amount of information from the Official Records and other sources on where and when black southerners became free during the U.S. Civil War.  He especially looks forward to thinking about the ways in which such projects could foster conversation and collaboration with local historians.

CVHR meets at 4pm on Thursday, February 2nd in the Kenwood Library at Monticello.

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CVHR January Meeting (5th): 2012 Goals for our website/database

January 5th, 2012

A get-to-grips with 2012 meeting. Updates on the NEH database project, fixing on ways to populate our website with non-database-related information we’ve gathered, and anything else you want to bring up. Come help chart a course for the year ahead.

Time: 4pm, Thursday

Location: The Jefferson Library is located on Route 53, almost half a mile past the Monticello entrance, if you’re coming from Charlottesville. Turn right at the white gateposts (an oval sign mentions Kenwood and the Jefferson Library). Park in the first lots you come to and walk uphill to the Library, the large building at the top of the circle.

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CVRH December Meeting (1st): Commonwealth vs. Judy (slave), 1859, and Beyond

November 21st, 2011

Alice Cannon will return to the story of Judy Woodfolk, convicted at the age of eight of attempted murder of her mistress, Margaret Rogers Terrell of Glen Echo. In Part One, Judy’s story ended with her delivery to the State Penitentiary in Richmond. In the midst of a microburst last June, Alice gave us Part Two, in which she discovered a Juda/Judy Holmes, presumably Judy Woodfolk, who survived prison and returned to Albemarle County by the end of the century.

In Part Three Alice will tell us how the revival of the once-rejected plan to build a Route 29 Bypass led to confirmation of the story she had pieced together but, as she says, “never imagined might one day be verified.” A proposed route for the Bypass would have gone through the Woodfolk cemetery behind Rio Hills shopping center, thus generating an archaeological impact study that provided the clinching testimony.

Members of the Woodfolk family will be with us at this meeting, which I hope will range in its discussion over the whole area including Hydraulic, Union Ridge, and Woodburn that was settled largely by African Americans after the Civil War. Much of the land they lived on is in the current path of the proposed Bypass.

Next meeting of Central Virginia History Researchers: Thursday, Dec. 1, 4 PM, at the Jefferson Library

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CVHR November Meeting (3rd): Carter G. Woodson and the Woodsons of Buckingham County

October 18th, 2011

Joanne Yeck, our Ohio member, will be in town this week, so we can get her to tell us about how her research on white Buckingham County residents led to discoveries about Carter G. Woodson’s enslaved ancestors. Her resources include our beloved post-Civil War personal property tax records, white church records, and birth records.

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CVHR October Meeting (6th)

October 1st, 2011

Topic: Enslaved Community at Bremo

We’ll have updates and announcements until 4:30. Then Andi Cumbo will tell us about her work on the people who were enslaved on the Bremo Plantations, established in the early nineteenth century by Gen. John Hartwell Cocke. She is writing a book that blends formal historical essays and creative personal essays in an attempt to tell the stories of these families. As part of this project, Andi has been seeking out descendants of the Bremo slaves.

And we’ll also discuss a good time to take up Andi’s generous invitation to us: an opportunity to visit the grounds of Bremo.

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CVHR September Meeting (8th)

August 25th, 2011

Next meeting of Central Virginia History Researchers: Thursday, Sep. 8, 4 PM, at the Jefferson Library*

NOTE this is second Thursday, not first Thursday

Topic: Summer re-cap with focus on Hydraulic-Earlysville community

A lot has been happening since the spring, particularly in connection with families connected to Hydraulic Mills, Bleak House, and Earlysville. Alice Cannon will tell us about the Evans reunion in late May. We hope that a newly-found Evans descendant will be able to attend (he has photographs of Nathaniel “Link” Evans we’ve not seen before). I’ll report on some other new connections. And I hope some of you will want to bring us up to date on what’s been going on as well.

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African-American Genealogy Workshop Announced at the Library of Virginia

August 4th, 2011

The Library of Virginia will offer Researching Your African American Ancestors: Genealogy to 1870 on September 29 from 10 AM to noon. Cara Griggs, reference archivist at the Library of Virginia, will discuss methods and resources for African American genealogy prior to the end of the Civil War. Workshop participants will explore ways of determining whether an individual was enslaved or free and what types of records will be useful for further research based on this information. The workshop will focus on records from the Library of Virginia collections including cohabitation registers, free negro lists, wills, deeds, Bible records, and personal papers, as well as selected federal records that can be accessed through its databases. To register for the workshop, call 804-692-3592.

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2012 Virginia Forum Announced

July 8th, 2011

Virginia Forum: March 29-31, 2012
James Madison University

“Greater Virginias”

The 2012 Virginia Forum will be held on the campus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The Virginia Forum is interdisciplinary and welcomes proposals from scholars, teachers, and professionals in all fields. The theme, “Greater Virginias,” emphasizes Virginia’s relationship across political and geographical boundaries to broader ideas, patterns, and adjoining regions. The theme is comparative and invites scholars to submit papers about all aspects of Virginia life, geography, environment, history, and culture. We plan to offer sessions and workshops that draw from the full range of Virginia-focused research, including the humanities and sciences.

We invite proposals from fields including all the arts and sciences: economics, politics, geography, law, literature, history, politics, archaeology and anthropology, environmental studies, museum and library studies, preservation, and others. Please submit a one-page paper proposal and a one-page curriculum vitae in a single email message to vaforum@jmu.edu by 30 September 2011. Please be sure to include your email address and other contact information.

Proposals for complete panel sessions, workshops, etc. are encouraged, and should include a one-page description of the overall session, as well as a separate, one-page description for each individual presentation in the session and a one-page curriculum vitae for each panel member. Additional information is available online at www.virginiaforum.org.

Direct further inquiries to: vaforum@jmu.edu.

Proposal Deadline: September 30, 2011.

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May 5th, Encyclopedia Virginia, Thursday 4pm

May 2nd, 2011

Matthew Gibson, Managing Editor of Encyclopedia Virginia, an online publication of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, will join us. He’ll describe the current and future content of the Encyclopedia, which is bringing to a single site a vast amount of information about Virginia history, politics, and culture. He’ll show us some of the latest methods of delivering that content to a number of different audiences and we can explore with him how our own research might reach a wider public through association with this project.

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April 7th: Field Trip, Ivy Creek Natural Area, Thursday, 4 PM

March 22nd, 2011

Topic: Hydraulic Mills Then and Now

Meet near the parking lot at the Ivy Creek Natural Area* at 4 PM for a guided walk to evoke the heyday of the Hydraulic Mills. Our main leaders will be Dede Smith, former Ivy Creek coordinator, and Tex Weaver, Manager of Geographic Data Services for Albemarle County. And some of the rest of us will chip in about what we’ve learned in the course of the CVHR project.

Sturdy footgear is recommended, since we’ll be walking the Ivy Creek trails through woods and fields, to include an overlook above the site of the mills, drowned by the Rivanna Reservoir in 1966.

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