Pender County Library to host genealogist tracing family line from southeastern NC to Virginia to Africa

BURGAW- On Saturday, Jan. 14, at 1 p.m., Pender County Library will host genealogist Tyrone Goodwyn for a discussion of his research tracing his family lineage from southeastern NC to Virginia to Angola in Africa. The hour-long event will be hosted in person in the Michael Y. Taylor Meeting Room at the Main Library in Burgaw as well as online via Zoom.

Goodwyn has researched free persons of color of southeastern North Carolina for more than 40 years. He concentrates on Pender, New Hanover, Sampson, Duplin, Wayne, and Cumberland counties.

In 2021, Goodwyn and a fellow genealogist discovered a 1745 northeast NC court record that yielded an important clue. Following this clue revealed a connection to a man in the 1600s named Gabriel Jacobs, a member of one of the first documented groups of kidnapped Africans in North America. He was the progenitor of the Jacobs family of free people of color in southeast NC and Tidewater VA.

The surname Jacobs is quite common in southeast NC. These families often identify as Black and as Native American. Several also identify as white. Many of these family lines—Black, Native American, and white—descend from the same root of people who came to NC in the mid-1700s, and have participated vigorously in the Revolutionary War and many significant American events thereafter.

Join us for a presentation by genealogist & Jacobs descendant Tyrone Goodwyn and as we discuss this exciting story!

This program is presented in partnership with Eastern Shore Public Library in Accomac, Virginia.

No registration is needed for attending in person. To attend online, register via our website, penderpubliclibrary.org, and follow the links under the Events tab. You can also call the library and the staff will take your registration by phone.

For more information or assistance, call Pender County Library at 910-259-1234 (Burgaw) or 910-270-4603 (Hampstead) during regular business hours.