It was the summer of 2006, when I stepped off the cool airplane into the heat and humidity at Monroe Regional Airport. I was back in the Louisiana of my ancestral roots. My body was filled with great anticipation.
The Last of the Mohicans was made in 1992, just after my mother (the next to the last of my Mohicans) succumbed to cancer. Very much in Chingachgook's moccasins, I am the last, now, of the Boleman-Herrings.
(This article was published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the Jan. 7, 2013 edition.) Former residents of Revilletown--an African American community to...
I don't know your names or from where you were stolen. I don't know how many of you freed yourselves or died in bondage. Yet I claim you all and I honor you.
When we first came to America a long time ago, Ngoai, my maternal grandmother, suffered a sort of crisis of faith. She prayed and lit incense sticks and tapped the copper gong to call our ancestors' spirits, but she was no longer convinced that her prayers were heard.
I grew up on the hyphen between two identities. My father's family had traveled from Russia to New Haven, Connecticut via Ellis Island. My mother's family traced their roots to medieval Spain and came to Cuba by way of Greece and Turkey.
Dreams are sacred texts from the soul. Our own original wisdom speaks in infinite forms, always encouraging us to return to who we are at the level of heart and soul, reconnecting with what heals and restores vitality, joy, and connection to all creation.
Both Cumes and Kelley emphasized that the spirit guides they connect with are not necessarily recent blood relatives or blood relatives at all. In fact, some of them go back to ancient times. In a sense, "everybody is your ancestor," says Cumes.
By Kate Wong Readers of this blog may have noticed that I’m obsessed with a recently discovered member of the human family tree: the nearly two m...
Perhaps many reading this will consider me a relic to place so much weight on accuracy. If so, I suppose it's an occupational hazard as a genealogist's worth is measured largely in credibility, but what do you think?
Pay a visit to Melanesia's Solomon Islands, 1800 kilometers northeast of Australia, and you'll notice a striking contrast: about 10% of the dark-skinn...
Several years ago, I conducted extensive genealogical research into the heritage of Michelle Obama. A few of my discoveries -- particularly those per...
D.T. lived in hopeful expectation, but even today, it's stunning to think that the life of this one-time slave overlapped with that of his great-granddaughter, Marian, who now resides in the White House.
Michelle's maternal grandmother, Rebecca Jumper, did an admirable job of keeping her past a secret, but that's probably because she didn't know much about it herself. That's unfortunate, because hers is an intriguing history.
It's providential for Michelle's sake that LaVaughn ever met Fraser C. Robinson, Jr. because he would have much preferred to never leave the South.
How old is animal life on Earth? Bizarre fossils unearthed recently in Namibia suggest the earliest animals were around 100 million to 150 million yea...
Maybe it was your son's family tree homework assignment, or maybe it was that co-worker bragging about being related to Jesse James, but now you've got a bit of an itch to take peek into your past. Perhaps I can ease you along your learning curve.
Among the half million African Americans who moved to Chicago during the Great Migration were a number of Michelle's relatives, and they hailed from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri and the southern part of Illinois.
This is the second in a series about the ancestry of the First Lady. The introduction can be found here: Michelle Obama's Ancestors: Chicago Beginni...
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama's presence in the White House is historic. A hundred years from now, scholars and school children will still be stud...
WASHINGTON -- Were the Neanderthals simply crowded out by the ancestors of modern humans? That's the theory of a pair of British researchers, who say...
If you think that these kinds of apocalyptic beliefs are "primitive" or "far-fetched," think again. Americans seem to have a deep hunger for reading material about the End Times Rapture.
If we break the chain of addiction, violence or other inherited, limiting beliefs, our children and their children and those who follow them are given access to possibilities not available to the ancestors. And thus, the entire lineage evolves.
On St. Patrick's Day, Barack Obama announced his intention to visit Moneygall, his ancestral hometown, during an upcoming trip to Ireland. It's believ...
It was just last week on St. Patrick's Day while hosting Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny at the White House that President Obama announced his u...
