Ninety years ago, a Texas grocer named Lorenzo D. Buchanan stepped forward with one of the great hoaxes of 20th-century American pop-culture life, a genealogical fabrication that continues to resonate today. The Great Buchanan Inheritance Hoax rocked American life from 1931-1936 with his false tale of an $85 million inheritance that was available to anyone who could prove a family connection.
Researching African American genealogical history is complicated by several factors, most notably slavery and subsequent Jim Crow policies. Use this handy resource guide to get started.
Reference Librarian Candice Buchanan offers advice to researchers and family members who are interested to searching for the names and activities of women involved in the suffrage movement.
It’s time once again to dip into our Free to Use and Reuse sets of pictures, culled from the Library’s millions of copyright-free photographs, prints, maps and so on. This month, we’re featuring things that relate to ever-popular genealogy searches, as people look to uncover the secrets of their past by identifying their ancestors and the …
Ahmed Johnson is a local history and genealogy reference librarian in the Library’s Main Reading Room and a specialist in African-American history. A bibliography he created, “African-American Family Histories and Related Works in the Library of Congress,” guides Library researchers seeking to understand their families’ stories to printed and digital sources at the Library. Here …
This is a guest post by Bryonna Head, a public affairs assistant in the Communications Office. It is reprinted from the January–February issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine. The issue is available in its entirety online. The Library’s local history and genealogy resources make it easier for African-Americans to explore their family histories. …
(The following is a guest post by James Sweany, head of Local History and Genealogy in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division.) The best way to preserve your family history is to write it down. By publishing your family history, you are able to capture and preserve the stories, pictures and genealogical data, making it …
The Library of Congress has one of the world’s premier collections of U.S. and foreign genealogical and local historical publications. The Local History and Genealogy Reading Room, located in the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, is the hub for such research. More than 50,000 genealogies and 100,000 local histories comprise its collections. The Library’s royalty, nobility …
In addition to today being Flag Day (you can read more about that here), June 14 is also Family History Day. This actually makes me think of my dad, who has become quite the budding genealogist. Over the last several months, he has been extensively researching our family tree. Apparently one of my very distant …
