This presentation will be about the history of photography.

 

Hillary Delaney serves as the lead researcher for the African Americans in Boone County History initiatives at Boone County Public Library's Archive and History Center. She has documented hundreds of Underground Railroad incidents and genealogical data items for thousands of individuals once enslaved in Boone County and across Kentucky.  Projects developed from this work include: The Underground Railroad in Boone County bus tour (a National Park Service Network to Freedom program,) historic roadside markers in Indiana and Kentucky, African American cemetery documentation in Boone County, the African Americans in the Kentucky Borderlands database and the “Legacy of Enslaved Mothers” short film project. Her work has received local, regional and national recognition.

 

Cemetery preservation is challenging under the best of circumstances, requiring funding, manpower and constant attention to keep the final resting places of the dead in respectful shape.  The forces of development, climate events and neglect are constantly at odds with the goals of loved ones, descendants, and preservationists. Black cemeteries face all of these forces plus the additional hurdles of missing or damaged markers, out-migration of families, lack of advocacy, the redlining of historic Black neighborhoods and a deficit in pre- and post-Emancipation record- keeping. Join Hillary Delaney as she unpacks these problems and gives examples of how to find, identify and memorialize the burial sites of African Americans in any community.