Our little genealogy club meets the first Saturday of each month. It was convenient that talking about local genie clubs was part of genea-bloggers weekly prompt this week.
It was a decent turn-out. Our club is very informal. We bring each other up to date on where we are in our search. In turn we help those who are stumped, if we can, and try to inspire others not to give up. I was able to report on my latest doings--the book signing, the ancestry.com webnar about african-american genealogy, and my trip to Newberry Library. I was so proud of myself especially since I had kind of slacked off there for a while. I can feel the old bug now, though. I mean, two posts in two days!
What is also helping me is that I got to talk to Florence Octavia Alexander Townsend. I followed up on the clues I found yesterday and was able to track her down. She was friendly and enthusiastic. We are planning to meet very soon. She shared something very interesting in our short conversation. She said her grandmother's ancestry is part Indian--east Indian. According to her, some Indians had immigrated to Kenya and intermarried. I never heard that before. So maybe it is possible that Catherine has East Indian blood after all. Of course, I will verify first, though.
3 comments:
We had a missionary visit our church quite some years ago who was of East Indian ancestry, but was from an African country. He told us there was quite a migration of Indians to Africa.
It just goes to show you can learn something new everyday. I am going to do more research into this to see how it may have impacted my family ancestry.
I remembered that the missionary said there was a lot of prejudice in Africa against the East Indian people and so many of them eventually immigrated to places like the UK or North America.
I did a Google search for "migration from india to africa" and came up with a book on Google Books called Jainism: The World of Conquerers. On page 79, it explains the migration of the followers of Jainism from India to Africa. I believe this is what the missionary was referring to. His family had been followers of Jainism, but he had converted to Christianity.
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