Finding Your Roots – Part 1
Want to find your roots? Listen in on why it’s a valuable and important journey to start.
Want to find your roots? Listen in on why it’s a valuable and important journey to start.
While in Ghana, one of the local kings gave me a new African name during a naming ceremony.
A large part of my conversation with Luana focuses on a concept called heirs property, a form of land ownership that occurs when someone dies without a will, leaving heirs without a clear title to the property. Without definitive proof of land ownership, heirs property owners can’t get home improvement loans, farm loans, and certain kinds of insurance, among a host of other things.
Plantations visually, tend to be strikingly beautiful places that also embody and represent violence, pain and suffering.
When we think about slavery, we don’t usually consider the day to day or the gory details. The general knowledge of captivity, hard labor and cruelty are the basics, but for the most part, the actual experience that enslaved people went through are forgotten. Slavery inflicted generational trauma in so many different ways; fear, uncertainty, humiliation and mental and physical stressors.
Gullah Geechee foodways is one of the oldest practices and traditions that’s still being practiced in America today. At its foundation, slavery and the foodways are deeply rooted in cultural West African ancestral ties, as well as adaptability, creativity and circumstance. The meals were and still are designed to be hearty and provide the necessary sustenance and strength to get one through an arduous and physical day.
By Luana M. Graves Sellars Enslaved women on a rice barge in Georgetown, SC Any
Being around Mother Emily Meggett is just like being at home, even though she has been honored by the City of Charleston, on countless TV interviews on CBS and other major mediums, but, through it all, she is just as gracious and generous with her time as any great grandmother would be.
Joining the church, at one time, was an ancestral African tradition called seeking.
The practice was based in the thought that since God and the ancestors communicated through dreams, the interpretation of the dream, represented achieving spirituality.
Georgetown County is full of an incredibly rich Gullah Geechee history and cultural attractions that I was very excited about exploring to fill in the gaps to my story.