Last week’s episode of the GeneaBloggers Radio Show focused on ways to engage youth in genealogy. At the same time, here in the NCGenWeb project, we learned of our own real-life example – what a coincidence!

Some 10th grade students participating in a summer school course taught by history teacher Ms. Martinez were working on projects related to slavery & the slave trade. In the course of their research, the students found resources linked from the Halifax County NCGenWeb’s African American page to be of particular help.

A few students found your page to be very informative and resourceful for their projects. Thank you for making such a good reference available for them!  — Ms. Martinez

Not only that,  as a way to give back, they wrote to the county coordinator, Deloris Williams, to suggest the inclusion of additional resources to add to the page.  As an incentive, Ms. Martinez provided students bonus points if their suggestions were incorporated.   After review, Deloris did in fact incorporate a couple of the links suggested, including a page from PBS’s Africans in America collection, noting:

The link to the PBS website is part of one of the links I’ve used myself in my own research and I know how very informative it is because it offers so much information about many different eras on the website.  The link that I was planning on adding, however, is the Arrival of first Africans to Virginia Colony, since that page is more specific to the area of North Carolina research.

Thank you to Ms. Martinez for engaging your students to become more active in the research process and for thinking of the NCGenWeb project! For anyone else who is interested, you may visit the NCGenWeb African-American page for even more resources.