"My Jackson family identified as Caucasian for the last five generations, but after 30 years of genealogical research I rediscovered a family secret. My great-great-grandfather, Arthur Jackson, was born an African-American slave in Virginia in 1856."
David W. Jackson, founder of the Orderly Pack Rat and author of "Born a Slave," reveals the hidden chapters of his family's past. He has written or contributed to over 60 titles. David shares his unique strategies for structuring his book, the importance of timelines, and the breakthroughs achieved through "cluster research."
Get an insider's perspective on the world of self-publishing as David provides invaluable tips on managing citations, the nuances between self-publishing and traditional publishing, and the challenges of promoting one's work. Learn about his experiences with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
Be sure to bookmark linktr.ee/hittinthebricks for your one stop access to Kathleen Brandt, the host of Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen. And, visit us on YouTube: Off the Wall with Kathleen John and Chewey video recorded specials.
Hittin' the Bricks is produced through the not-for-profit, 501c3 TracingAncestors.org. Thanks to MyHeritage for their generous support to Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen! Follow us on social media and subscribe to HTB with Kathleen in order to enter your name in our monthly MyHeritage Complete Package giveaway starting Jan 2024!
"My Jackson family identified as Caucasian for the last five generations, but after 30 years of genealogical research I rediscovered a family secret. My great-great-grandfather, Arthur Jackson, was born an African-American slave in Virginia in 1856."
David W. Jackson, founder of the Orderly Pack Rat and author of "Born a Slave," reveals the hidden chapters of his family's past. He has written or contributed to over 60 titles. David shares his unique strategies for structuring his book, the importance of timelines, and the breakthroughs achieved through "cluster research."
Get an insider's perspective on the world of self-publishing as David provides invaluable tips on managing citations, the nuances between self-publishing and traditional publishing, and the challenges of promoting one's work. Learn about his experiences with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
Be sure to bookmark linktr.ee/hittinthebricks for your one stop access to Kathleen Brandt, the host of Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen. And, visit us on YouTube: Off the Wall with Kathleen John and Chewey video recorded specials.
Hittin' the Bricks is produced through the not-for-profit, 501c3 TracingAncestors.org. Thanks to MyHeritage for their generous support to Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen! Follow us on social media and subscribe to HTB with Kathleen in order to enter your name in our monthly MyHeritage Complete Package giveaway starting Jan 2024!
John:
Ladies and gentlemen from the depths of flyover country in the heartland of America, the Kansas City on the other side of the Mighty Mo, welcome to Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen, the do-it-yourself genealogy podcast that features your questions and her answers. I am John, your humble hubby host, and on part one of this two-part episode we have a very special guest founder of the Orderly Pack Rat and author of Born a Slave, david W Jackson. Now let's start hitting the bricks.
David W. Jackson:
Hey there, john, we're here again.
John:
We're here again and we have a guest today, david W Jackson. I tell you what I'm going to start with, the first sentence, I think in the preface. My Jackson family identified as Caucasian for the last five generations, but after 30 years of genealogical research I rediscovered a family secret. My great-great-grandfather, arthur Jackson, was born an African-American slave in Virginia in 1856. Okay, so I'm hooked. Yes, go ahead, kathleen.
Kathleen:
I have a question what book are we talking about?
John:
We're talking about Born a Slave. Oh, you wanted the title.
Kathleen:
Yeah, you wanted a title.
John:
Yes, thank, you, john, I'll do that. Born a Slave, born a Slave.
Kathleen:
Okay. So, John, there's a couple of things I want to make sure we know about David, and that is he lives here in Kansas City and he has a really interesting background, even before writing the book. Of course, I love the book because he mentions me in it a couple of times. But let me get back to that.
John:
I skipped over those parts.
Kathleen:
You had them highlighted in red but, I knew where to skip over those Post-it notes and all that.
John:
That's not true? Yeah, the post-it notes marking the page.
Kathleen:
So, David, can you tell us a little bit about your background first?
David W. Jackson:
Well, I was always interested in history I guess you'd call it because I would stay inside and listen to my grandparents talk, then go outside and play with the other kids, and so I don't know what they were saying, but I just like to be around them. By the time I reached 11 years old in 1980, you can do the math that was the year the 1980 census was being conducted and my mom was filling it out at home and I also had a great-grandfather who passed away that summer. So I started asking questions about the family history and I got hooked on genealogy and this was, of course, before computers. So I had to go to the local library and check out books on how to do genealogy. So that's how I started in genealogy. I would come back from Florida where I lived with my parents and lived with my grandparents during the summer times, and they started taking me to the local libraries. So I started using my library card the mid-continent library system checking out books and then going to their genealogy department where my grandparents would drop me off there through the day and pick me up at the end of the day. I was in the basement of the north independence branch at that time and again, this is before they had any computers. This was rolling microfilm all day long.
David W. Jackson:
So that's how I started genealogyogy, and that interest in genealogy led to asking questions in high school. You know, what do you want to be? When you grew up and the tests came back that I was supposed to be a forest ranger or an archivist. I did not know what an archivist was. So I really wanted to be a forest ranger. I think I said I answered those questions perfectly. I'm standing off the tower and protecting the woods, you know, but that is hot and sweaty, your mat is not clean. So I finally figured out hey, an archivist does the same thing. They preserve trees and other forms. Those are the people I've been working with all these years, and so I went all the way through high school and college to become an archivist.
Kathleen:
You were. What about nine or 11,? Somewhere around that age, you were 11. Did you know the word genealogy?
David W. Jackson:
Yeah, well, you know, I went to the library and started looking up family history is what it was cross cataloged as and my family is a bunch of pack rats. So I was real lucky to have lots of materials that had been handed down for generations on both sides of my families, and I was really lucky to have all four of my grandparents alive, and with me I mean my last two grandfathers passed away when I was 47. So I was lucky, wow, wow.
Kathleen:
You had a lot of quality time with them, lots of great stories about them, and their lives and their parents and their grandparents' lives.
David W. Jackson:
So I got stories about my third great-grandparents firsthand from people who knew them Stories about my third great grandparents firsthand from people who knew them.
John:
In the back of the book I thought that Roy Weldon his story with Nancy. I just thought that was one of the sweetest stories I've read.
David W. Jackson:
Yeah, he wrote that too, I just typed it.
John:
You just typed it. He wrote it With that being so personal.
Kathleen:
So what was in this story that was so sweet? Because I don't remember it.
John:
Roy Weldon Jackson was talking about Nancy Rogers Jackson.
David W. Jackson:
Yeah, he was praising his wife, my grandmother, for sticking around with him for all those years. You know and truly coming up from. You know from both of them being very poor, starting out in their early marriage in a shack in the back of a house in Kansas City, and she told me that she knew it was time to move from that shack when she noticed that the baby that they had, the first child they had, the bed linens were being eaten by rats because of the milk and the you know residue, and so they were using the spigot of the next door neighbor's house as water. So I mean they were truly poor and they pulled themselves up and had a great life and, of course, spoiled me to death.
John:
So yeah, that is so neat. I just absolutely loved that and the fact that he wrote it, that those were his words. That's just that's icing on the cake for that, but okay, so.
David W. Jackson:
It's included in that book because my grandfather, roy, lived as a child with his grandfather, with his grandparents, the Jacksons, and he did not know all his life until I told him that his grandfather, that he knew as a child, had been born a slave. We had tried to find Arthur's story for a lot of years together. It was really really difficult, like pulling teeth, as you might imagine, and that's the story of most African Americans, at least before 1870, as Kathleen well knows and talks about in every lecture she gives.
Kathleen:
Yes, I do.
John:
So you've been to those? Yes, I learned from the best.
Kathleen:
Thank you, David.
John:
We'll put that on continuously.
David W. Jackson:
You deserve dinner tonight, kathleen, dinner out. Yes, yeah, okay, go ahead, kathleen. I'm sorry.
Kathleen:
So David your company has the word pack rat in it. You just mentioned it. Is it named after your family for that reason?
David W. Jackson:
Well, yeah, my family is a bunch of pack rats, but I am unlike my grandparents, who were just complete pack rats, as you might imagine. You know they grew up, as I said, poor and they collected and saved everything they ever got and they also went through the Depression. But I am an orderly pack rat. So that is the name of my company, my small side business orderly pack rat small side business, orderly pack rat.
Kathleen:
So, john, one of the reasons I wanted David on the air with us is because he does what I try to get everyone to do, and that is to move your genealogy research from your bedroom or your office at home to a book where it can be shared with everyone. And what I wanted David to do is maybe explain the pros, the cons, the benefits, how it feels to publish, and just give us some background.
John:
Well, yeah, actually I really was interested in the structure when you were writing it. Were you approaching it more as a narrative or as, let's say, a chronology?
David W. Jackson:
It kind of morphed and it morphed into, of course, what it ended up being. So it was basically a timeline to begin with, because I'm always in my lectures and I think Kathleen does the same thing try to encourage people to build timelines for themselves and their ancestors, because it's so helpful to look at a timeline and see gaps and you can tell where somebody was at one year and 10 years later they're at a different place. But then you've got all these other years and sources in between. So it really helps to look at the migration pattern of your ancestors. But also, if you're missing records or if you're missing a date that you want to fill in, it's a whole lot easier to see where to look because you've got the timeline of their life.
David W. Jackson:
And with Arthur, when I really discovered that he had some interesting aspects to their race and culture in their household, where he was always listed as mulatto or black and his wife was always listed in the census as white and their kids were all mulatto when I asked my grandfather that, I discovered that early on in like 1981. I came home to him with that census report from 1920, and all the census that we ever found for them were that way. And so he says well, grandpa wasn't black. If anything, he was an Indian, because he remembered a so-called brother coming to visit the house as a child one time. And he says that man, that Uncle Dennis Jackson, looked just like the head of a buffalo, nickel. And so I went back to the National Archives the next day, kind of dejected, like wow, if he was an Indian, a Native American, I'm not going to. It's going to be really hard to find him Not thinking that if he was African American it was going to be equally as hard. But the archivist there at National Archives said that there was no designation in the census for Indians or Native Americans. They were all listed as black or mulatto themselves.
David W. Jackson:
So I kind of gave up on Arthur's line for a long time. Uh, little things would come here and there, little tidbits from newspapers that were beginning to be digitized and that would kind of get me back into it, and so, um, finally, I had an email in 2010 from a long lost cousin who I'd never met we did genealogy together, you know, remotely and she suggested that I look for this particular census report for an Arthur Jackson in northern Missouri, hope County to be specific, and that he may be a lead for me, and it ended up. Arthur was living in 1880 with his former slaveholding family, also named Jackson. That's how I. That was the linchpin, the key that connected both those families, and I can tell you that since Born a Slave was published in 2015, I kind of pushed it to get it done before my grandfather passed away and I did it. He died in 2016. So you got to see his grandfather's picture on a cover of a book. He was most impressed with that.
Kathleen:
But since that book came out.
David W. Jackson:
I've continued genealogy on the Jacksons and I have been so lucky because I focused on his slaveholding family and in doing so I have found Arthur's parents and his grandparents. That's going to be the second edition I've been working on Fantastic, so great success on that.
John:
Well, and that's Kathleen. I know you have to invest in slavers, not just looking for your ancestor, who might be African-American, but you have to know about that family.
David W. Jackson:
I was going to say it's a lesson for anybody doing genealogy to fan out they call it the fan research to look at neighbors, anybody in the county with that surname, is going to be a possibility for you, no matter if you're black or white or looking for black or white ancestors.
Kathleen:
And that's what I was getting ready to say. If you're even looking for your enslavers, you're a descendant of an enslaver. There's also keys in those records because you can use a slave like a Lovejoy. I was able to trace a Lovejoy slave and put them with the Wright Smith family, so I was looking for white Smiths. But the only key I had was this one slave who didn't wasn't named James Tom. You know Mark and Michael. So we always want to do that. As David mentioned that cluster research, that you know, fan out to that whole community.
Kathleen:
So yeah, that helps a lot.
David W. Jackson:
I did a lot of work to trace down the slave holding family and it just so happened that one of those people just kind of fell into my lap One day in 2013,. I was giving a lecture in Westport on how to research the history of your house it wasn't even on genealogy per se and this one man in the audience as I was talking I thought he looks a lot like my dad. I was just thinking that and he came up to me. He was the only one to come up to me after the program, maybe because I had been looking at him. I don't know.
David W. Jackson:
But he asked me where my Jacksons were from and I says well, we've lived in Kansas City for 100 years, but before that they lived back near St Louis. And he goes well where? In St Louis? Because nobody knows a little town named Labadee, missouri in Franklin County, and he goes. Well, my Jacksons were from Labadee and come to find out he is a descendant of my Arthur and Jackson's slaveholding family. Small world, isn't it? And just last summer I discovered that we are actually biologically related. So I'm not only you know, not only have the story in records now, but also in dna connections to my slaveholding family, which is not unusual, right?
Kathleen:
I mean, there's a reason that the slave side was mulatto, so yeah, so there's, that makes a lot of sense yeah, and the, the small world department, that goes a little bit beyond that.
John:
That's like ancestors working in the background or something you know. To get that connection, yeah, somewhat, you're chatting about homes and you end up with a guy you just happened to. You know, that's amazing.
David W. Jackson:
There's a subheading in Born a Slave that you've got there in front of you. John called Spirit Speaks Because. I had about five instances over a six or seven month period where they were working it and they were that people were just being attracted to me and they were all related to these, to this Jackson family. It's amazing.
Kathleen:
You were calling on the ancestors. That's what we say calling on the ancestors. So, David, again, you wrote this book. I know you wanted your grandfather to see it. Why did you find it necessary to share it and did you self-publish? Okay?
David W. Jackson:
Well, I wanted to not only tell Arthur's story and John asked earlier about the structure of the book, so it did start out kind of narrative, but then I really wanted to make it more of an instructional book as well for other people doing black genealogy. And so the timeline it's basically a glorified timeline because it does go chronological after the first couple, three chapters. You know that leads readers into how I got to that place and so you know, after those first introductory chapters it's basically a glorified timeline. So after those first introductory chapters it's basically a glorified timeline and it's just easy to just kind of, I hope, see that progression of his life going and intermixing with his slaveholding family and all the people that he ended up naming his children after.
David W. Jackson:
On the white side of the family he used the same names as they did and these are not unusual. I mean, these were not usual names like Virginia and Walter. You know you don't see those every day, but they're on both sides of our family. So so that was the structure and how that book kind of came together. But I wanted it to be a manual for others. So there are little asides throughout Born a Slave, that kind of guide researchers to basically just expanding their toolbox. You know all the things that Kathleen teaches in her lectures on. You know outside records, thinking outside the box. You already mentioned the slaveholding families records, that kind of stuff. So it kind of serves both of those purposes I hope.
John:
To that point. One of the questions I had was collecting citations. So the book has just copious end notes and chapter notes and then indexes and things like that. My question is when you're doing the book, where are you collecting those? Do you have a technique, for this is how I make sure that everything is where I expect it to be, so that when I use a particular piece of data or refer to a particular, then I have the citation in place.
David W. Jackson:
My books are constructed as kind of organically I guess you'd call it, because I just start with a simple manuscript and it just keeps building from there. It's one document and as I add a source or a document that I have found, you know, integrating it into the narrative or into the timeline, then I cite it. You know, right then and there, and it goes as an end note. Right then and there, you just keep up with it.
David W. Jackson:
Yep, and I'm always massaging it. These things come, come together over at least five. I've been working on another book, couple books, for 10, 15 years, and these are books that are still in the works right now. So born a slave is just one of more than 60 titles that I've helped to add to local history bookshelves in the last 20 some years, either on my own or in concert with other people. So in one you know aspect or way of way or another.
Kathleen:
So so, david, actually I didn't realize that's how you did your citations. That is the way I even do my final reports, is I put them in there? I don't do extra Excel sheets on the outside. I don't do all of that extra. My thing is right in my word file at the time, in my end notes, or front notes yes, keep it simple. So yes, because that way I know and I can move things around and it's already tagged and I don't have to worry about it.
David W. Jackson:
And I have occasionally I come across a source like oh my gosh, that would be great in this other book I'm working on. So I can just go to that one manuscript, go to that citation, copy paste into the other manuscript.
Kathleen:
You know some, it doesn't happen a lot, but it happens enough to where it works, yeah, sure. So how do you actually publish your books?
David W. Jackson:
I would say that most folks that are listening to this will probably have already decided that you know what they're wanting to do is self-publish instead of trying to approach a publisher. There are university presses, as you know. There are random house names and all that stuff and people have probably already thought about that and probably dismiss that if they're considering a genealogy book or even a local history book. You know it's not. We might think our local history is pretty wonderful and fascinating, and it is, but whether somebody in New York or London thinks so is a story. So selling a manuscript to a publisher has never been my bag. If anybody approached me and well, they did. Actually, in about 2010, uh, the history press um, wrangled me in on publishing one of their series of, you know, local history books. So I did a Kansas city book and, uh, it's got Kansas city in the title, even though it's a Jackson County book, uh, in the interior. But I did all the work for these people. You know everything. You know writing, editing, laying it out, providing the photographs on a schedule, on a deadline, and the book came out really nice and sweet. It's just a little touristy type booklet. You know no citations. They strip all that stuff out and you know, and the benefit of course is that little tourism booklet is on Walgreens bookshelves at the end cap at Walgreens or at Costco. It's been sold at Costco.
David W. Jackson:
So the biggest drawback to self-publishing is marketing. That's where people kind of fall short, and so I think I'd like to hold the talk about marketing to the very end, because that's what you do at the end. Most people enjoy gathering material, researching it, putting it together. So if you have any baseline word processing skills, you can put a book together. It can be a poetry book, easy peasy. You can publish just a book of your genealogy charts. That's the easiest way to do a genealogy book is just enter all of your material on familysearchorg. Do you encourage people, kathleen, to enter material there?
Kathleen:
With the JCOM file.
David W. Jackson:
I have it over there. So you know I tell people if they upload their material, just type it in. A lot of times it's already there. I have found most people if they get back to their parents or grandparents, great grandparents on, their genealogies are kind of built and you can print those charts out, nice typed things, and you can just slap them together, put them in a book and call it yours. You know it's.
Kathleen:
Of course, the biggest issue is accuracy.
David W. Jackson:
True, true.
Kathleen:
So that's the biggest issue is is how do I know? This is accurate, and that's why the citation is so important.
David W. Jackson:
Every name, date and place. That's right. Most of my books after that Kansas City Chronicles book that I did through the History Press, again it's out there in the market. All my other books have been done self-published through what is today called KDP Kindle Direct Publishing. It's an Amazon company. It used to be called CreateSpace, so basically anybody who can put a Word document together, no matter what it is. Like I said earlier, if it's a poetry, collection of poetry or your grandparents' love letters, you know. Whatever it is. Kathleen, I know you've done a book on black marriages from saline county. You know you just you just copied those, uh, original record books.
Kathleen:
I compiled it, indexed right and added a few extra things about the cemeteries and things that are also of interest with that and it's more of a compilation because I really didn't do a lot of writing except index.
David W. Jackson:
Compilations are great. They're a great resource for genealogy, and did you self-publish that?
Kathleen:
We actually went through a lady who did that. I think what she really did was printed. I was going to say she did more printing she did the printing, so I guess we did self-publish. John did the cover, she did the printing, and you do put ISBN numbers on your books right Always.
David W. Jackson:
yeah, I do mine a little differently because I buy my own ISBNs, because I want my books to be the orderly pack rat imprint.
John:
But for people who are just doing a book or two at a time, or maybe one book only in their whole life, and kdp assigns free isbns, so oh yeah, wonderful so that's yeah, okay, so kdp is something that, uh, if you're, if you're thinking about this or getting kind of excited about, hey, this is this is really possible for me to tell my story, um and and self-publish it in a format that other people might find interesting, and it is free and available as well. It's free, yeah.
David W. Jackson:
Until you order books yourself as an author and you get them at cost. There is no charge for using that service. Your books are up online at Amazon at no cost to you. They're available to the world, you know, of course. Course the world has to find them. So once you, once you finish your manuscript which is pretty intense, you know it depends on how intense your book is, how thorough, how decorative. You know all the pictures and text flowing together that you've got your chapter starting on a right-hand side page and not the left hand. You know those kinds of issues that you've got to look at.
David W. Jackson:
So then you just convert your Word document to a PDF. You upload it to KDP, you fill in all the data. It's really. It walks you through it step by step. You put in you know a little blurb about your book. You click a button and it assigns an ISBN, it puts a barcode on the back of your book and then you get to design a cover. And people are intimidated by that. But they have templates where you just upload a picture or two and they have different designs. Then you pick your design, whatever one that appeals to you, and there you have it. You've got your cover as well. I do my own covers now. I used to use the templates, but I've done so many books I think I've used all their templates up.
David W. Jackson:
So another thing about self-publishing too is if you have the resources to hire a proofreader or an editor, go for it. I do not, so I tell people if you find an error in my book, it's on me. Sorry about that. Keep reading, Move on. You know I'm thinking typo, or?
John:
grammatical.
David W. Jackson:
You probably won't find a citation or source error, because I'm pretty thorough about that stuff.
John:
Well, congratulations, you've made it to the end of part one of our interview with David W Jackson. Part two will be showing up soon wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, so be sure not to miss it. And do you have a genealogical question for Kathleen? Drop us a line at hittenthebricks at gmailcom and let us know.
