Tulsans wanting to learn more about their family history are invited to attend a series of free, genetic genealogy sessions Thursday through Saturday.
The City of Tulsa, Greenwood Cultural Center and Intermountain Forensics are partnering to host the workshops. The Community Engagement Genealogy Project is supported by a three-year, $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Emmett Till Cold Case Investigations and Prosecution Program.
The sessions are focused on topics like African American family history, Oklahoma Native genealogy and Dawes Rolls census records. The goal is to help people who may be stuck trying to do the work on their own and help folks gain a better understanding of how genealogists identify victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Registration is required but it doesn’t mean you have to attend every session.
“They can drop in. They can spend a few hours. They can go one day,” Janel Cherry Daniels, an investigative genetic genealogist on the project, told The Eagle. “It’s to their comfort level.”
Attendees also have the opportunity to sign up for a virtual or in-person consultation with a genealogist. Their work is about “connecting the past to the present,” Daniels said.
“When people see their family and relatives and resources and documents — even just physical descriptions — it really touches them,” she said.
The workshops, held downtown in the Gradient building at 12 N. Cheyenne Ave., are set for 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday and Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.
Many of the genealogists leading the sessions have been involved with the city’s mass graves investigation. The fifth round of excavations at Oaklawn Cemetery wrapped up in November.
Michelle Burdex, program coordinator at the Greenwood Cultural Center, hopes people take advantage of the weekend’s offerings to learn more about their ancestors and “honor them by learning about their history.”
Burdex said people will gain tools and resources to do deeper genealogy research on their own.
The Greenwood Cultural Center is currently undergoing renovations. Once repairs are complete, the center will house the Gathering Greenwood exhibit, which includes census data, photographs and maps from the 1910s and 1920s.
“This is restorative genealogy, this is reparative genealogy. For African Americans, our history, our records, our documents, have been disregarded, discarded and it leaves us having to work so much harder to identify our ancestors and to learn about who we are and where we come from,” Burdex said.
