In this interview Muriel McDowell Jackson, the Head of the Genealogical & Historical Room and Middle Georgia Archives at Washington Library, shares how a family bible and her own family’s history sparked her interest in genealogy.

“As I watched various family members pass on, I realized I was losing information,” she says, “Every time someone dies, you lose a library.”

She shares how local Black history can be learned through genealogy, using obituaries and social news published in the Telegraph dating back to the 1920s and 30s. She explains that this important everyday history gets lost as people pass on.

“General history about churches and the schools and everything else is what is getting lost,” she says, “So people can’t appreciate where they came from because they don’t know.”