Constitution Week Events

Next week there will be  2 FREE Events that you may interested in attending at the Hamilton County Courthouse in Chattanooga, Tennessee!

12:00 noon, Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Constitutional Bell-Ringing at Hamilton County Courthouse

6:oo pm, Monday, September 22, 2014

Hamilton County Commission Room, Courthouse

A Constitution Celebration with Questions/Answers
Tom Greenholtz, “A Discussion of Presidential Power”
Chambliss, Bahner and Stophel

TVGS Spring Seminar 2014

I have another fun and informative workshop coming up to share with you. The TVGS, The Tennessee Valley Genealogical Society, is having their Spring Seminar on May 3, 2014. It will run that Saturday from   9 am - 2:30 pm at the Huntsville Public Library Auditorium. It includes a wide variety of presentations from Pay Sayre, a Certified Genealogist and Certified Genealogical Lecturer. It also includes lunch and book sales. She will be discussing Military Records; Maps and their Usage; The Black Sheep in your family; and NARA's finding aids.
Find attached a copy of the flyer that includes the registration form and your lunch preferences.
Everyone from TVGS looks forward to seeing you there!

Local Cave Art

On Monday, April 7, 2014 at 6 pm,  Dr. Jan Simek, president emeritus of the University of Tennessee system, will speak on the Cumberland Plateau cave art, located from the Kentucky line down into Northern Alabama. Dr. Simek has documented, through carbon dating, art from between 500 and 6000 years.

The 6,000-year-old cave art, discovered by Simek and his team, revealed clues as to what Native American life in the South may have been like at the time. Many drawings depicted humans with pointed tools alongside wild dogs, serpents and other beasts. Other drawings of celestial designs allude to a spiritual understanding of the universe.

http://www.kwkt.com/news/ancient-tennessee-cave-paintings-show-deep-thinking-natives

Annual Genealogy Workshop

Chattanooga Delta Genealogy Society is proud to announce its 2014 Genealogy Workshop!

The workshop will be held on Saturday, February 22, 2014 at the Ooltewah United Methodist Church from 9:30 a.m. until 3:00 p.m.  (registration begins at 8:30 a.m.)

We welcome:

Linda Woodward Geiger, CG, CGL, who will be presenting two topics: 

    ”I Swear Allegiance – Naturalization records 1790-1950″ and 

    “More Than Land Descriptions: Treasures among the Deeds.”

Linda Mines, Hamilton County Historian, will present “Early 19th Century Tennessee: The War of 1812 and Beyond.”

Deborah Liening from the Ooltewah Family History Center will give us a Tour of FamilySearch and New FamilySearch Family Tree.

Pre-registration for the workshop (through February 15) is $20 for members and $25 for non-members.  Visit our website here to learn more!

Hope to see you there!

James County Historical Society is announcing their winter meeting. It will be held February 2nd, 2014 at 2:30 pm at the Ooltewah United Methodist Church in Ooltewah.

We have a great speaker. His name is Bob George from the Bradley County Historical Society. He will be speaking on the history of Cleveland and its Revolutionary Heroes.Their most important hero was Colonel Benjamin Cleveland, a commander at the Battle of Kings Mountain during the American Revolution.

I must admit that I don't know anything about this. I am looking forward to what he has to say. I just love History! Hope to see you there!

CAHA Annual Meeting

The Chattanooga Area Historical Association is announcing their annual meeting and lunch on February 1, 2014 at 11:30 am. The meeting will held at the Chattanooga Choo Choo in the Centennial Ballroom. The cost is $26.00. Please contact the CAHA for attendance qualifications.

The speaker will be Dr. Ned Irwin, Archivist for Washington County, Tennessee. He will be speaking on "Bottling Gold: Chattanooga's Coca Cola Fortunes". Coca Cola put Chattanooga on the map as the first place the drink was bottled and sold. Before that time, it was only available in soda fountains primarily in the Atlanta region.

Created Equal: America's Civil Rights Struggle

To celebrate Black History Month, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Martin Luther King, the Chattanooga Public Library is pleased to host a film discussion series on civil rights.  The Create Equal series uses the power of documentary films to encourage community discussion of America's civil rights history. The series consists of four documentaries, The Abolitionists, Slavery by Another Name, The Loving Story, and Freedom Riders, that chronicle the civil rights struggle from Revolutionary times to Martin Luther King. 

The first event is The Abolitionists (February 4: Library Auditorium. 6-7:30pm) -  Vincent Phipps, storyteller and motivational speaker, will begin with a dramatic reading of the  Emancipation Proclamation. The Abolitionists' release in 2013 marked the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The film's ​protoganists William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Angelina Grimke, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown fought to end slavery through newspapers and broadsides, literature and religion, and finally political action and violence. The scholar for the session will be Raymond Evans, author of Chattanooga: Tennessee's Gateway to the Underground Railroad and Historic African American Places in the Chattanooga Area.​ The Library will present clips from the film followed by discussion. 

More about the Create Equal Series at the Library:
The Chattanooga Public Library is honored to present these four documentaries with riveting new footage illustrating the history of civil rights movement in America.  It is one of 473 institutions that will bring these films into the communities they serve, hoping to help bridge racial and cultural divides in America civic life.  These films tell the stories of men and women who challenged the social and legal status quo of deeply rooted institutions, from slavery to segregation. 

Created Equal: America's Civil Rights Struggle is made possible through a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as part of its Bridging Cultures initiative, in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. 

Program note: All of the films, with the exception of The Loving Story, will be shown at the downtown library auditorium. Our community partners at the Bessie Smith Cultural Center will present The Loving Story at the BCCC on February 18. In addition to the film series the library will present a genealogy workshop as part of Black History Month​, From Africa to America: Tracing Your Roots, on Saturday, February 15. 

Dates, Times, and Places

Abolitionists: February 4, 6-7:30pm Library auditorium

Slavery by Another Name: February 13, 6-7:30pm Library auditorium

From Africa To America: Tracing Your Roots: February 15, 10am-12 Library auditorium

The Loving Story: February 18 6:30-8pm Bessie Smith Cultural Center

Freedom Riders: February 25, 6-7:30pm Library auditorium