WHAT I LEARNED THIS WEEK (July 9-15) — Some of us are making family connections. Valarie Cornell and Vanessa Lindsey did so on July 9 with this exchange:

Vanessa Lindsey: Are you related to T Wiley and Shirley Ann

Valarie Cornell: T Wally was my Dad.

Vanessa Lindsey: Hello cousin, your grandmother Aunt Mae Emma was my dad's Robert Loyd aunt his mother's sister. She was Lula Rakestraw's daughter who grew up on Needmore St also.

Valarie Cornell: Hello I remember my dad saying we were related to Rakestraws I'm so happy to meet you.

Sierra N. Hill posted a query on July 12 that began: “Good morning group. I have been seeking questions for years about my roots….” It turns out that Sierra and I are cousins, descendants of Shelton Shipp and Caroline Garrett Shipp. Sierra connected me with other Shipp relatives in DeKalb and Fulton counties that I knew of but had no way of reaching until I “met” Sierra here on Facebook. A couple of weeks ago, I shared with Keisha Hamm that we, too, are connected via the Garrett line: My great grandmother Caroline Garrett Shipp was the older sister of Ina Garrett Milsap. Ina was Keisha’s great great grandmother.

I expect that as we go along, we will meet lots of kinfolks. I encourage people to take advantage of those “OUR PEOPLE” sections where we spotlight different family names each week. So far, we have: Carr, Elliott, Giles, Hamm, Lee, Usher, and Williams. Others will be added shortly.

Beyond genealogy, I learned about the Miss Black Teenage Contest that was held in the 1970s. The first winner was Kaye Michelle Curry, representing the Hardin Street community; and Melanie Williams (now Biggs ), representing the Pleasant Hill community, was the first runner up. Ronnie Pierce was instrumental in producing that contest in his role as youth director of the EOA, a county social services agency.

Thanks to Vanessa Lindsay, Judy Lucas, Cherry Crawford and others, I learned quite a bit about the families of the Needmore community. Others filled us in on a significant coming-of-age or rites-of-passage venue in Needmore: The Blue Room. Thanks to my sister Norma Shipp, we are beginning to learn not just of the distant past — whether church histories or beauty pageants — but also what she calls “Current History.” There’s no better example of that than the recognition of Santana Flanigan as a rising star in the Georgia legal world.

Let’s continue to uncover, preserve, share and, above all, MAKE history!

E. R. Shipp post on The Black Heritage of Rockdale Facebook page.