Event Title: Crawford Unite: Celebrating the Legacy of Reverend Jeremiah and Dovetta Crawford
Event Date: June 15, 2024
Event Description:
Dear Family of the late Reverend Jeremiah and Dovetta Crawford,
The annual Crawford Unite family reunion celebration is June 15, 2024. This event serves as a tribute to the remarkable legacy of the late Reverend Jeremiah and Dovetta Henderson Crawford, who have left an indelible mark on our family history. I am the grandson of Jeremiah and Dovetta Crawford.
At Wilson Griot Legacy, our mission is to honor and preserve the stories of our ancestors by connecting individuals, families, and communities to their ancestral roots. Through meticulous research and the latest advancements in DNA analysis, we strive to uncover the rich tapestry of our family’s past and ensure that our ancestors’ legacies endure for generations to come.
As part of Wilson Griot Legacy ongoing research efforts, a complimentary DNA test kits to those family members interested in participating in the Jeremiah and Dovetta Crawford project will be included for those interested in providing critical insights into the family’s lineage and help uncover hidden connections and narratives.
Those family members interested in joining this journey of discovery can leave their first name, last name, email address, and phone number by sending it to wilson3310@comcast.net. A scheduled interview to gather additional information for the research will be provided.
Participation in this endeavor will not only contribute to a collective understanding of family history but also to honor the legacies of Reverend Jeremiah and Dovetta Crawford.
https://kinseekers.org/ Black Family History Special Interest Group (SIG) Black Family History (1900 – 1950)Every other month, 3rd Saturdays 10:00 – 11:00am (Eastern Time) via Zoom. Led by Charles Wilson Next session: Saturday, 17 February 2024. Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrceGtqTsrGNFeMxyGIwfNtuvRX2A4krdg#/registration Primary topic is researching communities with emphasis in February on African Americans and railroads, but open discussion is welcome and encouraged!
This Special Interest Group (SIG) focuses on Black family history during the pivotal decades from 1900 to 1950. Join us as we encourage and collaborate with each other to explore and document the rich family histories generated during this era.
Recordings from recent Black Family History even are available in the Kinseekers’ Members Area through February 2024: – Researching Black Family History, 1900-1950: Essential Foundations (Taneya Koonce) – Context Matters: Researching Black World War Two Ancestors (KB Barcomb)
I will be joining with the Kinseekers Genealogical Society of Lake County, Florida in conjunction with the Leesburg Public Library in a special event on Saturday, September 23, 2023.
Both in-person and virtual event:
Saturday, 23 September 2023
9:45am – 3:30pm EST
Informal meet ‘n greet at 9:30am EST.
Event is free & open to all!!
Presented by Kinseekers Genealogical Society and the Leesburg Public Library.
I wanted a share another book. This book is by John Fountain entitled, Dear Dad, Reflections on Fatherhood. This book was published in hardcovered in 2010 and will be republished in paperback. The book will feature essays by writers and one of the essay writer is Kevin Sconiers, writing about his father, William Sconiers. It is a personal reflection of his current relationship of an aging father.William Sconiers is a direct descendant of Luke and Ellen Sconiers. Their narrative lineage is written in this WordPress previously and excerpts included in the first chapter of the book Black Homesteaders of the South which I wrote. Luke and Ellen Sconiers were the great grandparents of William Sconiers. William Sconiers is the oldest brother of my mother-in-law, the late Hazel Sconiers Williams Johnson and the uncle of my wife, Burlenda Wilson.
Reflections on Fatherhood: ‘There Is Hope For Healing’
‘As fathers, we must learn to say, “I’m sorry.” To seek forgiveness, and yet to try to avoid those regrettable, hard-to-forgive and egregious inflictions that can indelibly stain our children.’
“Dear Dad”, published in hard cover in 2010 will be republished as a forthcoming paperback and will feature essays by writers, including Kevin Sconiers, shown here with his father William Sconiers as they fish from a pier. (Photos: Provided)
Dear Dad
A Song of Reconciliation: A Son’s Enduring Love For A Father
Three generations of Sconiers men are represented here by Kevin Sconiers, 60, (middle) with his son Kevin Scnoiers II, 41, and his father William Sconiers, 94.
By Kevin Sconiers
I KNEW THIS DAY WOULD change things. I wasn’t sure exactly how. But I knew that things, that life, would be different now. I had decided to bring my 93-year-old father from Enterprise, Alabama, to suburban Chicago to live with me and my wife.
It was a cold wintry Tuesday, on Feb. 9, 2021. It had taken me more than a year to make a final decision on moving my dad in with us. And with good reason: I wasn’t sure that I could handle the responsibility of taking care of him. What if it turned out to be too much? Too taxing? Too problematic? What would I do then?
“I understood that meeting my father’s daily needs would be challenging. But my greatest challenge was managing my own feelings.”
I didn’t have the answers. But I decided to get on the airplane to bring my father home. Perhaps somewhere in the deep recesses of my heart and soul, I also hoped for reconciliation between us, for some measure of healing with the man I have always loved and longed for.
Of this I was aware, even as I boarded the Southwest Airlines jet to pick up my dad: That life and Father Time, unresolved hurts and unanswered questions too often undermine the possibility of resolutions and reconnections between fathers and sons (and daughters) before death buries those hopes in the grave. My father and I at least still had hope.
My father, William Sconiers, had begun showing signs of dementia. As his condition worsened, he began needing assistance doing even the simplest kinds of things that come natural to a man: bathing, shaving, and getting himself dressed. His ability to walk had diminished. He needed help simply getting around.
I understood that meeting my father’s daily needs would be challenging. But my greatest challenge was managing my own feelings. My relationship with my father has never been easy. I was rebellious as a child. He was always emotionally unsupportive, physically present but absent. I was angry. He seemed indifferent. I wanted his advice. But for much of my life growing up, he never gave it. Amid his disengagement, I had to figure things out for myself.
Eight months shy of my 20th birthday, I became a father. Even now, 40 years later, I still remember the fear I felt upon my induction into fatherhood, the deep sense of inadequacy I could not escape. My son’s mother and I both had a great support system, and both of our families helped us in every way imaginable. Our mothers were simply extraordinary. Without them, we might have failed miserably.
My father, on the other hand, never even initiated a conversation about me having become a father. It was almost as if he didn’t get the memo. Or maybe it was the case that he just didn’t know what to say. Maybe he was disappointed in me. I don’t know. I cannot say for sure. I do know that I desperately wanted my father to tell me something, to say something, anything. Instead he said nothing.
A young William Sconiers, father of Kevin Sconiers.
At The Root: Rejection
My relationship with my father was shaped by my feeling rejected. I am 60 now. When I was a child, perhaps about 8 years old, I bought him a gift. I don’t remember the occasion, whether it was Father’s Day or his birthday. But I remember being excited to give him the gift.
I hoped he would open it and say or show how much it meant to him. I waited but he didn’t open it—at least not while I was there. I can no longer remember what the gift was. But I will never forget the stinging sense of disappointment I could still feel in my heart many years later. There were other interactions that widened the gap between us. I later came to realize, however, that I was, in some ways, just as responsible for our divide as father and son.
“I had decided to disrespectfully test my father’s resolve and lost.”
Once, when I was a teenager, my father told me to shovel snow from the front porch of our home and the walkways. I was on my high school’s basketball team at the time and wanted to go to a practice scheduled that day. I told him that I’d get it done when I returned from practice. But my father was having none of it and insisted that I remove the snow immediately. I had decided to disrespectfully test my father’s resolve and lost. I shoveled the snow and missed basketball practice. That incident was defining: the snow and cold perhaps a metaphor for our icy divide as father and son.
Now, many years and a lifetime later, he was moving in with me, with us.
My father and I hadn’t lived in the same house in well over 30 years, and in the intervening years we rarely even spoke. Whenever we did, our conversations always felt awkward, as if we were trying to find words that had not yet been invented. There was no animosity between us. Just the sort of disconnection that some fathers and sons experience on the path of life in which misunderstandings, hurts and bittersweet times can drive an eternal wedge between them.
I moved my father in. At first, we struggled, the contrast in our lifestyles glaring. My father was accustomed to staying up late at night. We, however, rarely stayed up much past 10. I tried to make his meals healthier. He wanted nothing to do with that. Once, he disagreed with something I wanted him to do. He decided he had had enough of me bossing him and insisted I take him to a hotel. I declined, of course. But it truly took everything within me to not accommodate him.
The responsibility of caring for my father was not convenient. My wife and I could no longer do simple things, like traveling on a whim, or simply going on a date without finding someone willing to stay with him while we were gone.
In the midst of the difficulties adjusting to my new life with my father, there were times that I’d thought about all the times I needed advice from him—about sports or music, about being a father—and he was mum. Or the lifetime of events I participated in and he was MIA.
Even into adulthood, I had to navigate those feelings. It was easier to navigate from a distance but now, with him lying in just the other room inside my house, it wasn’t so easy.
Some nights I climbed out of bed to attend to one of his needs, and all the while I felt resentment. It coursed through me with a kind of crippling heaviness that gnawed at my psyche and soul unrelentingly. I knew I needed healing. I needed peace. Reconciliation.
William “Bill” Sconiers
A Song For My Father
I play my piano for my father. His face beams with joy. His lips spread into a smile whenever music wafts through our house, turning back the hands of time, penetrating the wall of his dementia to his heart, mind, and soul. It is part of our father/son ritual months since he moved in. Our conversations began to unfold more easily as we sat in my home, as I shaved him, washed him, played my piano for him.
Despite my earlier resentment, we arrived here at this juncture as father and son, after resolving that I needed to make a conscious decision to be led by empathy rather than by hurt. To love without requirement of recompense, with no regret. To forgive, even if I may never forget.
“I began to prioritize my father’s needs over my unmet hopes and expectations as a son.”
That journey to healing began by recognizing my own imperfections. As I reflected on the grace that people had extended to me in my darkest moments when I felt the most unworthy. I thought about my own sons and the times that I have certainly disappointed them. I thought about the time I had wasted in my life and about the uncertainty of the time left to us. I thought about my father. I thought long and hard about how much I wanted to have a relationship with him even if I didn’t really know how.
It took some time and patience. But I began to prioritize my father’s needs over my unmet hopes and expectations as a son. Over a lifetime of what-ifs, and over feelings of rejection. It wasn’t easy. But eventually I started to see, to feel, changes in our relationship.
We talked over piano and during the myriad responsibilities of caring for my father. And I began to learn things about him that I didn’t know. I learned how much my father enjoys music, how much it lifts his spirit. Whenever I play songs like Nat “King” Cole’s, “Straighten up and fly right” or Louis Jordan’s “Caldonia,” my dad sings along. One evening, he even asked if he could play the piano. (Keep in mind, the home I grew up in always had a piano, but my father never sat down to play it.) That evening, he played for 30 minutes.
Dad has always loved sports and he can still call balls and strikes with the best of them. His favorite thing is having a good laugh. We laugh a lot now, especially while watching a good movie, or a silly YouTube video, or a joke told by one of my brothers.
My father smiles a lot these days. He is never happier than when his family—me and my wife, my brothers, and his grandchildren are around him. He never really says how much we mean to him. But I know. I see it. I see him. And I know he sees me.
Home Sweet Home
Next month, my father will turn 95. I am grateful that we have a chance to talk and laugh with each other. Things have changed, however. After caring for him for nearly two years as his primary caregiver, I have had to make the decision to place him in a care facility for veterans, where he can best be cared for, having the opportunity to engage with others and receive medical treatment and care.
It was a hard decision because we’ve grown really close. Months earlier, we talked with him about the move and assured him that we would always be available to him. That we would never abandon him. That I will always love him.
My father has since settled into his new surroundings, where they all call him, “Papa.” He and I talk several times every day and I make sure to visit him a couple of times each week. Occasionally, he comes to spend time at home.
During one of his recent visits home we went fishing. It was the first time I had ever gone fishing with my father. It occurred to me that we have come full circle in our relationship. And that the healing process simply needed our permission to begin.
It was an honor to coordinate a birthday celebration on March 31, 2023 in memory of my mother, the late Dovetta Victoria Crawford Wilson (1923-1995). I continue to serve as Board Member and Board Secretary of the David and Dovetta Wilson Scholarship Fund, a non-profit 501(C)3 organization established in 1990 in honor of my parents, David and Dovetta Wilson who were so special and instrumental in my life.
The program was on Friday, March 31st as a virtual celebration and then on Saturday, April 1st was an in person gathering in New York including a college/university day in conjunction with the New York Public Library and the Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church.
Here are some video footing of the program sharing the occasion:
Virtual Program celebration to honor the late Mother Dovetta Wilson (1923-1995)
Glad to announce my contribution to another book of historical and genealogical interest: From Sea to Sea Stories by Navy Chaplains of African American Descent: Transformational Moments of Ministry by African American Navy Chaplains , published December 21, 2022. A synopsis of the book as written states,
“Transformational Moments of Ministry
All battles are not fought on some distant battlefield, or in the air, or at sea, during war. The battle for dignity, respect, and acceptance often occurred daily in navigating the prejudices, biases, and egos of insensitive colleagues often blinded by privileges that are uniquely theirs. These battles, obscured and ignored, have produced other heroes who have made lasting contributions to the Naval Services ministry.African American Navy Chaplains’ stories are worth telling. Some stories are funny, some are serious, and some force introspection. But all reflect the Navy’s Core Values: Honor, Courage and Commitment. Every narrative, in some way, reflects the four professional core competencies of the Navy Chaplain Corps: Provide for specific religious needs from our own faith traditions; Facilitate for the religious needs of others true to their faith traditions; Care for all; and Advise commanders on moral and spiritual dimensions of complex decisions impacting mission and the welfare of the crew and their families.
To be sure, the intent of this book is not to cast aspersion, but rather to place in context what God has done and is doing for our Navy in providing a growing edge for a better, more inclusive, more diverse, tough, resilient sea service force that is a mission-ready and world-wide deployable. ……… this collection of narratives focuses on the joy and satisfaction of delivering life-transforming ministry to Sailors, Marines, Coast Guard personnel, and their families.
These are their stories. . .”
Here is specifically my story included in the book:
Members of the African American Griot Legacy (AAGL) DNA Project at Gedmatch and FTDNA can join a closed group on FACEBOOK called African American Griot Legacy for FTDNA and GEDMATCH members.
This group is a space for AAGL Gedmatch and FTDNA members to connect, share stories, and explore ancestral roots together.
Interested members can join the group in the following manner:
Search for “African American Griot Legacy for FTDNA and GEDmatch Members” on Facebook.
Request to join the group.
Once request is approved, read the group rules and guidelines before posting.
The group is a closed group, which means that only members can see the posts and discussions. This provides a safe and supportive space for to share and learn from each other.
Once again, the African American Griot Legacy DNA Project is a collaborative effort among individuals who are interested in tracing their African American ancestry through DNA testing. The focus is on creating a comprehensive genetic database that will help participants learn more about their heritage and connect with potential relatives.
The project is open to anyone who has tested with FamilyTree DNA (FTDNA) and/or uploaded their DNA data to GEDmatch and joined the African American Griot Legacy DNA Project on the FTDNA or GEDmatch website.
As a member of the project, the member will gain access to the group discussion board and have the opportunity to share information with other members. All participants are asked to follow the group rules and guidelines to ensure that the community remains respectful and supportive.
In addition to participating in the online community, members are encouraged to explore their genetic matches and build family trees to help identify potential ancestors. Guidance is offer on DNA testing and analysis, as well as resources for genealogical research.
If Gedmatch African American Griot Legacy Project members who are not in the FTDNA project, but have not uploaded their DNA to FTDNA and would like to join the FTDNA project, here are the following steps:
Go to the FTDNA website and create an account, if you haven’t already.
Upload your DNA kit to FTDNA. You can also purchase and choose to take other DNA tests available such as the autosomal DNA test or a more comprehensive test, sthe MTDNA and the Y-DNA tests.
Once you receive your results or uploaded to FTDNA, join the African American Griot Legacy Project on FTDNA by clicking on the “Join” button on the project’s main page.
Enter the DNA kit number and select the option to join the project. Access to the project’s resources will be available, such as the research articles and discussion forums.
Date: Saturday, 2/4/2023:Black Homesteaders of the South with Bernice A. Bennett
Time: Noon
Location: Oprah Winfrey Theater, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.
Dear Family History Center Friends,
You are cordially invited to our Black History Month lecture with author and genealogist Bernice A. Bennett who will uncover the stories of African American families who became landowners through the Homestead Act of 1862 from her latest book Black Homesteaders of the South. Bennett’s work is a modern story of black genealogists who networked through a Facebook page to trace the footsteps of their ancestors in Albama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana & Mississippi. Find out how these families navigated the application process through the federal government, and what this legacy means for their descendants today.
Bernice Alexander Bennett is an award-winning author, genealogist and host of Research at the NationalArchives & Beyond BlogTalkRadio program. Her genealogical interests focus on Southeast Louisiana and Edgefield and Greenwood Counties, South Carolina. Bennett is an author and contributor to 2 award winning books including Our Ancestors, Our Stories and Tracing Their Steps: A Memoir. A New Orleans native, Bennett is a volunteer with the Homestead National Historical Park Service identifying descendants of Black homesteaders to share their stories.
Sincerely,
Lisa Crawley
Robert F. Smith Explore Your Family History Center
Congratulations to Bernice Bennett in the October, 2022 book release published by History Press entitled, BLACK HOMESTEADERS OF THE SOUTH.
I was glad to have been asked to submit the federal land patent stories of Luke Sconiers and King Dock Sconiers who acquired land in Alabama through the Southern Homestead Act of 1866. Luke Sconiers story is the first of the forty-three stories in the book. King Dock Sconiers’ story, although not in the book, is included in the National Park Service website entitled Black Homesteaders (https://www.nps.gov/home/black-homesteading-in-america.htm)
My wife, Burlenda and adult daughters, Charla and Bonita are direct descendants of Luke and King Dock Sconiers. There are a host of Sconiers throughout the country today who are descendants(https://www.sconiersclanincorporated.com/). Some of the land as indicated in the U.S. Department of Interior Bureau of Land Management obtained from the Sconiers men in the 19th Century exist today in Scoinersville, Alabama in Bellwood, Geneva County, Alabama.
I had the privilege of writing a Family Lineage Narrative during my one year intensive ProGen Study Group (2019-2020). The submission in the book was an edited story from the genealogical Family Lineage Narrative that was included in this WordPress site. You will find the Luke Sconiers family sketch in detail on this site by scrolling to previous write ups in this WordPress.
WILSON GRIOT LEGACY 