San Diego African American Genealogy Research

Find your roots at Freedmen’s Project & Conference

Kathy Bence (Contributing Writer)March 9, 2016

“Discover Your Roots,” the 14th annual conference focusing on African American genealogy, takes place on Saturday, March 12, in Los Angeles. The conference will be held from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at 1209 S. Manhattan Place in Los Angeles. Registration at the door is $40. For more information visit discoveryourrooots.org or call 1-800-533-2444. Among the more than 20 workshops will be a class on the Freedmen’s Bureau Project presented by Thom Reed, who oversees global communication for the project. Emancipation freed nearly four million slaves and the Freedmen’s Bureau, formerly known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned

Religion

Retired Black Exec Finds Her Chinese Family

Kathy Bence (Contributing Writer)January 20, 2016

Pursuing her long-lost grandfather and her life-long yearning to know her extended family resulted in retired NBC Universal executive, Paula Williams Madison, meeting more than 300 Chinese relatives and finding lineage that dated back more than 3,000 years. Her book and documentary by the same name, “Finding Samuel Lowe,” is a memoire that leads from New York to Jamaica to China where Madison finally meets the family of her maternal grandfather, Samuel Lowe. “I had no idea that my family from China would be so large and we were blessed because of the way they reacted to us,” she said.