Welcome to my first blog post! My name is Amy L. Cole. I am the 4th child born to Lee Roy Pruitt & Jerlean Edwards Pruitt of Quitman, Clarke County, Mississippi. Tracing Amy: My Ancestral Journey is about my quest to learn more about my family history.
I started the blog after reading the appeal by Luckie Daniels, founder of African American Genealogy & Slave Ancestry Research, to make more of the research of African-American ancestry available online. After much consideration and a nod from my family, I decided to start blogging! My goal is to be able to provide a space where family members can follow and participate in my research.
Now that the blog history is out of the way, I think I should tell you a little about the names and places that I am researching. I decided that I wanted to do research on both my paternal and maternal lines. From what I know, both lines have deep roots in Clarke and Jasper Counties in Mississippi, post emancipation. My paternal lines are Pruitt, Dukes, & Carr and the maternal lines are Edwards, Sterling, Shanks & Stokes. I will tell you more about what I have found for each line in other post.
I have been able to take 3 of the 4 maternal lines back to the 1870 Federal Census giving me the names of ancestors that were possibly born into slavery. I was able to accomplish this by sifting through family records, conducting interviews with family members, visiting cemeteries, and collecting obituaries. Although I believe I have the name of the ancestors who would have been born into slavery, I have not yet started slavery research for my maternal line. I want to ensure that all of my information post civil war is correct. So, I am busy collecting birth marriage and death records as well as other records that will assist the search for my grandparents and great grand parents generation. I plan to continue to go back one generation at a time collecting these records and learning as much as I can so that I have a solid beginning to enter into slavery research.
On my paternal line, I have only been able to get back to the generation of my great grandparents. I will have to gather more information on this side because not much is remembered by those still living. So I have some…..lets call them speed bumps on the paternal side, they haven’t turned into brick walls just yet. 🙂
So that is a summary of how far I have gotten on the family tree as a whole. I have a couple of family reunions coming up in 2014, so I will probably focus on those lines the most in the coming months. I will try to keep you posted along the way.
~AmyC.
© 2013 Amy L. Cole and Tracing Amy: My Ancestral Journey. All rights reserved.
Tracing Amy: My Ancestral Journey 