“We’re just telling stories,” 88-year-old Amaker said. In 2008, founding member Mattie Amaker and her “girlfriends” invited a group of about eight into her living room to talk about genealogy. The study group is trying to change that. Many African American families have lost their family history, she said, and for many in Johnson’s generation, Black history wasn’t taught in school. ![]() Memories from the past can be painful and embarrassing, Johnson said, which means stories aren’t always passed down. ![]() “If you don’t know your history, you don’t know your potential.” “You need to know your history,” 80-year-old Johnson said. She shares these stories with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren - the fifth generation of her family raised in Evanston. Now, as a leader of Evanston’s African American History and Genealogy Study Group, Johnson has discovered some of the history her family never told her. As a Black family that moved to Evanston during the Great Migration, their stories of coming north weren’t happy ones, she said, and her family didn’t typically share stories of times that had been difficult to live through. ![]() Growing up, Evanston resident Catherine Johnson would beg her mother and grandmother to tell her stories about their family.īut they didn’t tell her much.
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