Good Genes Genealogy Services, LLC

05/26/2026

In 2 minutes, I will show you my (ancestry researcher) packing list across continents in search of history.

05/20/2026

(see this in Medium)
A Genealogist’s Packing List: Traveling Across Continents in Search of History

Ninety-degree heat. Forty-eight-degree cold.

That was the reality of my journey from Accra, Ghana, to Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

What Do You Pack for Research Across Two Continents?
One day, I was standing under the warm West African sun in temperatures reaching 32°C (90°F). Just six hours later, I stepped off a plane into Amsterdam’s chilly spring air of 9°C (48°F), arriving at the start of the country’s largest national celebration — King’s Day.

As I prepared for this international journey from the United States, packing became more than deciding what clothes to wear. I thought of the two continents, multiple climates, different cultural norms, and my optimistic research agenda centered on the African Diaspora and the history of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

My international travel goals were straightforward:

Actively participate in mission work with my church colleagues that focused on delivery of our donated goods and service at an orphanage, school, and village in Ghana.
Conduct historical and genealogical research related to the African Diaspora and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
Experience the people, culture, and history of each destination with a focus on safety and being respectful of local customs.
My so-called challenge was to fit everything needed for ministry, research, tourism, and everyday life into a manageable number of two checked and two carry on bags.

What follows are the lessons I learned — and the items I am glad I packed.

Pack Like a Researcher
Since 2010 when I first visited Rwanda, Africa as part of my doctoral studies, I learned that research travel requires a different mindset than vacation travel. Whether visiting archives, museums, cemeteries, historical sites, or cultural sites like the botanical gardens in Ghana, researchers need tools that allow us to capture information quickly and accurately.

My research essentials:
Smartphone with extra storage and internet access
Energy converters for plugs and other gadgets
Portable chargers
Large and small/thin notebooks and pens
Small cross-body bag
Digital copies of my passport and travel documents
Archive contact information and copies of permission documents to conduct research (know the protocols)
Cloud storage access for photos and notes
Activate the Whatsapp feature for telephonic and texting communication
Monies budgeted for copying, scanning, and other document preservation
My two days of research in Ghana at Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD) generated hundreds of photographs, documents, and observations. I reserved some and had many scanned by the PRAAD team and delivered to me via my Whatsapp because the documents were not deliverable through my email. In Amsterdam, the celebration of King’s Day precluded me from conducting research at its libraries that stored the historical records I was seeking. However, I was able to gather sufficient visual content related to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. A future writing will delve into this with more detail.

Some of my essential travel items for internatioonal research and tourism
Besides your passport, researchers should be well-armed with the essential travel items including the cross-body and a Ghanian made hand fan.[/caption]

In all, being organized matters.

Essentials:
Medical vaccinations and travel medicine (if needed), forms
Lightweight shirts and blouses
Compression socks
Convertible travel pants — preferably blue, black, white, tan
Light sweater or fleece — preferably fleece
Rain-resistant jacket
Comfortable walking shoes — my preference are Crocs
One outfit suitable for dressy formal occasions
Pack for the unexpected
I learned this lesson many years ago while on a mission trip in Costa Rica: Never pack your suitcase completely full. As a research traveler, I inevitably return with books, documents, maps, gifts and souvenirs that help me remember the story. The extra space I left in my luggage proved invaluable. Once I brought a foldable suitcase. Another time, while in Japan, I purchased a suitcase. It was much cheaper to buy it there than in the United States.

Great lessons
Every item in my luggage served a purpose.

I packed far more than clothing, my United States passport, and other travel gear. I packed my high curiosity about the once heavily traveled ship route between the Gold Coast on West Africa and the Netherlands. Those dealings resulted in the most lucrative aspect of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The most valuable thing I carried was an open mind to researching the most lucrative route of human cargo in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. My luggage helped me move between continents. Those internal qualities helped me move between centuries.

05/07/2026

In our African Diaspora genealogy and ancestral research, the root of our searches is often right in front of us.

On a recent hot Spring day while visiting Aburi Botanical Gardens -- located about an hour up the cool mountain hills from Accra, Ghana -- I unknowingly stepped on a leaf connected to history itself. As I walked through the gardens with my tour guide, Maxwell, and my country es**rt, Prince, Maxwell paused and encouraged me to pick up a dry yellowish leaf from the ground and crush it gently in my hands.

Immediately, a powerful fragrance rose from the leaf.

Mint.

Fresh.

Alive.

The scent startled me.

Maxwell smiled and explained that I had just encountered the African basil known locally as “Scent Leaf,” scientifically called Ocimum gratissimum. It was among the hundreds of plant species found among the 160 acres of exquisitely beautiful lands high above Ghana's capital city of Accra. The aromatic plant is one of hundreds of species found throughout the gardens’ approximately 160 acres of breathtaking tropical landscape overlooking Ghana’s capital city.

At that moment, what began as tourism quietly transformed into ancestral reflection.

The Gardens were established in 1890 during the British Colonial rule over Ghana. It became a site for agricultural exchange with British rulers and a tropical plant experimentation center. Notable were the plants and trees tied to the former ruling empires and the displacement of people. Some of the plants and trees originated from Brazil, the Caribbean, Sri Lanka, India, and Southeast Asia.

Fresh Scents for the descendants of the African Diaspora

Initially, I believed that visiting the Gardens would be a nice way to end my research, mission travels involving service to young children, and touring, would be a nice way to be a tourist among the African landscapes. Yet, Abrui Gardens demonstrated its ability to allow for remembrances, recovery, and a living memory of what took place on these hallowed ground more than 100 years ago.

Aburi Botanical Gardens, established 1890
Aburi Botanical Gardens beauty
Literally: Finding my Roots

At the wise recommendations from my extremely horticulturally knowledgeable guide, Maxwell, I experienced Aburi Gardens with freedom to learn by smelling, tasting, and touching nature's bounty. It was a form of ancestral reconnection. One of the most powerful realizations from Aburi Gardens is that genealogy does not exist only in documents.

Sometimes genealogy grows from the ground itself.

Maxwell is a trained horticulturist in Aburi Botanical Gardens, Accra, Ghana, Africa

What I did was walk through most of the 160 acres of colonial plant routes and learned about the indigenous knowledge systems that turned plants and trees into medicinal usages. I encountered plants and tree that allowed me to feel and see the shaping of daily African life and diaspora survival. The smelling of the mint, for example, gave me echoes of the trade routes that financially benefited worldwide capitalists who found synthetic solutions from African origins.

It was an experience for the ages.

Bringing the everyday African Diaspora researcher into the Gardens

For researchers exploring African Diaspora ancestry, Aburi Gardens offers important African Diaspora historical clues:

Established during colonial rule, the gardens became part of imperial agricultural systems that transported crops throughout the African Diaspora world.
Plants originating in the Caribbean, South America, and Asia reveal trade routes tied to colonial expansion and human displacement.
Indigenous medicinal traditions preserved in Ghana may echo healing practices later carried throughout the Diaspora.
Nearby Aburi communities, cemeteries, mission schools, and oral histories may contain valuable connections to colonial-era families and migration patterns.

For descendants of the African Diaspora, the gardens offer more than beauty.

Reflection in the Gardens

My visit to Aburi Botanical Gardens became more than I expected. It was a reminder that Africa still speaks through its landscapes, plants, and people. Sometimes the stories of our ancestors are not hidden in distant archives. Sometimes they are waiting quietly beneath our feet. And sometimes, all it takes is crushing a single leaf in your hand to awaken memory.

In all, there is a lot more to explore involving Aburi Gardens and the African Diaspora connections. I will follow up in future blogs.

05/02/2026

While seeking to confirm the identity of a pro bono client’s father, I unexpectedly discovered another way to verify whether a family lineage was accurate. The confirmation came through the grave records of the client’s 15-year-old aunt, who tragically perished in an early morning dormitory fire in south Georgia in 1940.

What followed was another reminder of the twists, turns, and emotional complexity that often accompany African Diaspora genealogy research.

The client and his brother shared the same name as their biological father, who was not married to their mother. The client knew his father’s name, the year of his death, and the alleged location of his burial site. As with most African Diaspora genealogy projects, I began with the traditional route — reviewing the race/ethnic references, names, approximate birth records, death records, and family connections tied to the client’s parents.

Initially, the research moved forward steadily. However, after adding several generations to the family tree, the records suddenly stopped. I had reached a familiar genealogical roadblock.

To work my way out of the blockage, I stepped back and carefully reviewed the foundational details again: The race/ethnic references, names of the client’s parents, their birth dates, death dates, locations, and associated relatives. Yet the challenge remained. The father’s name was common enough that thousands of similarly named men appeared throughout records across the United States. I needed another method to determine whether the individual I was tracing truly belonged to this family line.

The Curiosity Detour That Changed the Entire Family Search

I began reviewing every Ancestry.com hint connected to the father’s extended family — parents, siblings, grandparents, collateral relatives, locations, etc. During what I now call a “curiosity detour,” I opened the death certificate of the client’s young aunt.

At first glance, the document confirmed the expected information: Race, parents’ names, approximate ages, and location. But experienced genealogists know that some of the most important clues often hide in the less-obvious details. I mentally noted the funeral home operator and, more importantly, the cemetery listed as her place of burial.

That detail stayed with me.

Follow your intuition

Next, I searched Newspapers.com for reports of fires involving young women in Georgia during 1940. Initially, I believed she may have been connected to a substantial dormitory fire involving a male residence hall in what is now considered the metro Atlanta area. Yet nothing in those reports clearly linked the young girl to the tragedy described on her death certificate.

So I kept searching.

After hours of research, I paused — one of those quiet moments genealogists understand well — and simply reflected on the question: What really happened here to link this ancestor to my family research?

Then I found it.

An article describing the tragic circumstances surrounding her death confirmed the details listed on the death certificate. My curiosity detour had suddenly become a breakthrough.

But the real discovery came afterward.

The Cemetery Clue That Confirmed a Family Lineage

Because I remembered the cemetery listed on the death certificate, I began searching for that same burial location among other possible family members. There it was again — the identical cemetery name appearing across generations of relatives. Thankfully, many members of the family had lived and died in a small Georgia town, making the burial connections easier to trace.

The cemetery itself was attached to a small rural church.

That single repeated detail gave me a new level of confidence. The cemetery became the anchor point connecting multiple generations of the family together. Suddenly, the puzzle pieces aligned with greater clarity, allowing me to move more confidently through the family structure and verify that the individuals I was tracing were indeed connected to my client’s lineage.

Almost there

Only one major question remained: Locating the final burial place of the client’s father in order to construct a fuller timeline of his life. Family accounts suggested he may have been buried nearly a thousand miles away, while other evidence pointed back to the small church cemetery tied to generations of relatives.

But such unresolved questions are familiar territory in African Diaspora genealogy research.

There is almost always another mystery waiting behind the next document, another contradiction buried within oral history, another unexpected clue hiding in plain sight. That is both the challenge and the beauty of this work.

Sometimes the answers we seek are not found in the records we intended to search — but in the records we almost overlooked. Keep searching African Diaspora researchers.

04/29/2026

I got over 100 reactions on my posts last week! Thanks everyone for your support! 🎉

04/23/2026

Mothers of fraternal twin children: From left, Blog Author Ann aka Ama (born on Saturday) and "Abena" (born on Tuesday) at Elmina (Ghana) Slave Dungeon

Who knew that giving births to fraternal twins would be a strong linkage to connecting African Diasporan families? Do twins "run in your family?"

In African diasporan genealogy, I've found several clues that live within me as a fraternal twin mother, and within so many other African, African American, Brazilian, Caribbean women. In short, twin births are the highest among Black women in these regions of the world. By contrast, fraternal twin births are low in Europe and the lowest in East Asia.

I've been curious about the birth of twins since my boy and girl set were born some forty years ago at Georgia Baptist Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia USA. Each time I've visited Africa since 2010, I've met mothers of twins, family members of twins, and of course, twins. The intersting feature is that often fraternal Black twins -- that is, not identical ones -- do not necessarily have similar outward features. I have a sense that some combinations of people are twins and that is how I often make such connections on USA, Caribbean and African soils. On an April 2026 visit to Ghana's Elmina community, I easily located a mother of fraternal twin children (pictured, on right). She, too, had a boy and girl twin who were soon to celebrate a milestone birthday.

Diaspora Connection

The same regions in West Africa known for higher twinning rates are also regions where many our enslaved Africans ancestors were trafficked from. It is interesting that elevated rates of fraternal twins among African-descended populations in the U.S., Caribbean, and Brazil. I met groups of people from northeast Ghana who are connected to Brazil.

This is more than a statistic—it is continuity. Even after the forced enslaved passages across the Atlantic Ocean where we are still piecing together generations of separations, something remained.

Fraternal twinning that is mostly linked to West African ancestry is a huge genealogy search clue. This inherited trait traveled across generations during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and still appears in families today. For genealogists that include me, and for all family researchers, twin births are helping to trace maternal lines.

This means that we can reconnect with our ancestors through another familial linkage and remind us that even when records are long gone, our fraternal twin ancestry leaves a wonderful mark.

Twins as Genealogical Clues

As we comb through government and other historical records, be on the look out for the following clues about your family that will likely help to further identify African geographical and genealogical linkages:

Two children listed with the same age and date of birth in early Census records;
Probate, plantation, church and other social documents referring to "twins";
Oral family stories about the "two born together"; and
Repeated twin births on maternal sides of our families.

I've located twins on my paternal and maternal family lines based on the connection of birth dates. It is shoring up my family's linkage to West Africa.

In most of West Africa, the birth of twins is considered a significant sign from the gods. Amongst the Yoruba they are thought to bring good luck -- St. Louis Art Museum
More Than a Coincidence

For those who are interested in the science of twinning, fraternal twins happen when a woman releases more than one egg during ovulation. Research shows this occurs more often in some West African populations than anywhere else in the world. That means it may not be random when repeated twin births occur in a family line—especially across generations. Our ancestors and today's Black families often remark that "twins skip a generation" or something similar when explaining the phenomenon of twin births within families.

For instance, my maternal grandmother gave birth to fraternal twin daughters. Skipping a generation, I birthed fraternal twin children -- John and Jocelyn.

Several recent studies track twin births in West Africa. According to a study of data from 135 countries by the University of Oxford’s Christiaan Monden and his colleagues published in 2020, the Ivory Coast had a rate of 24.9 twins for every 1,000 births during 2010 - 2015. The report found that Ghana and South Sudan had the second-highest twinning rate, each with 24.8 twins per 1,000 deliveries, followed by Liechtenstein on 24.7 per 1,000. About 1.6 million twins are now born worldwide each year.

“The twinning rate in Africa is so high because of the high number of dizygotic twins – twins born from two separate eggs – born there." He continued, “This is most likely to be due to genetic differences between the African population and other populations,” explained researcher Monden.

Next steps

We spend our time in genealogy and ancestry research searching for what was lost. Things and people are not really lost, all are simply unrecognized.

Twin births remind us that our ancestors left patterns, traits, and living evidence of who they were and where they came from. Even in the absence of records, the body remembers.

Our stories are told in pairs.

04/08/2026

(1866-1955) was the son of sharecroppers whose parents died early and was left to other family members to raise. At 13, Matthew worked as a cabin boy and learned the finer points of seamanship. He met at 18 and joined him for over 23 years exploring Greenland and the . Henson was a great role model and one of the greatest the world has ever seen.
Henson, at first, was largely overlooked for his accomplishments by the public, but Peary thought him to be ever loyal and indispensable. Peary said before the final journey to the North Pole, “Henson must go all the way. I can’t make it there without him.” Henson is now credited for being the first to plant a flag at the North Pole, arriving with three Inuits in 1909. Not until April 6, 1954, nearly half a century after he planted an American Flag at the pole, was Matthew honored with an invitation to the White House by President Dwight David Eisenhower. Additionally, Henson had the USNS Matthew Henson named after him in 1996. In 1988, Matthew Henson was reburied at Arlington National Cemetery by presidential order. Read about more at https://www.yocumblackhistory.org/

04/07/2026

Sometimes our ancestry searches yield updated and unexpected and even more mysterious results. Just last week, I was checking out a great uncle who I thought was named Harvey Robinson or Wilks. His draft card says differently. The one factor that I got right -- and so did my fellow family ancestry researchers -- is that my maternal great-grandmother, Edna Robinson, was his mother.
Research upshot: Keep reviewing existing records!

04/07/2026

This precious clipping from the late 1940s involves my inlaws -- now an ancestor Ruby Louise Mast Kimbrough.
Remember to search newspapers - The Black Dispatch - for family stories Are you searching for a new and exciting way to connect with your family's past? Look no further than the archives of The Black Dispatch, an acclaimed newspaper that has been capturing and documenting the stories of African American communities for over a century. Founded in 1915 by civil rights activist and journalist Roscoe Dungee, The Black Dispatch quickly became a pillar of the Black press, serving as a source of news and information for African Americans across the United States. Since then, it has been covering important local, national, and international events that have shaped the Black experience. The Black Dispatch is important to our African Diasporan genealogy research:

Rich in history: The newspaper has been a vital part of Black history, chronicling important events such as the Civil Rights Movement, the Great Migration, and the election of the first African American president.
Uncovering untold stories: The Black Dispatch regularly featured articles and obituaries about ordinary people in the community, giving valuable insight into the lives of your ancestors.
Community-focused: Unlike mainstream newspapers, The Black Dispatch focused on issues and events that were relevant to the Black community, providing a unique perspective on historical events.
Rare photographs and advertisements: Along with news articles, The Black Dispatch also featured rare photographs and advertisements, giving you a glimpse into the everyday life of your ancestors.

With its extensive coverage and rich historical value, The Black Dispatch offers a unique opportunity to uncover and preserve your family's stories.

02/28/2026

Great info!

Confusion. Too many “favorites” lists. Too many “Top 100” lists. Too many opinions. Indeed, that’s just what the myriads of “top website” lists are:...