SOAL

09/11/2026

On September 11, what do you remember?

At SOAL, much of our work begins with a name. Sometimes a name nearly lost to history. We practice the conviction that every name represents a whole human life that tethers family, work, love, struggle, laughter, dreams, and people left behind.

But memory asks more of us than keeping names. It asks us to follow what happened next.

Today, we hold space for the lives lost on September 11, 2001 and its aftermath, for all those who still carry that loss, and for the choices and consequences of the last twenty-five years, including their long-term effects on our democracy.

May we remember deeply enough to ask not only what happened, but what happened next, and what we choose now.

[ 📷 source: Highsmith, Carol M., Carol M. Highsmith Archive. Library Of Congress. https://lccn.loc.gov/2011631493 ]

09/09/2026

History is not the administration’s property.

Devastated. Still processing the news of Lonnie Bunch’s retirement. We share grief and the alarm behind it.

Bunch, the Smithsonian’s first Black secretary and founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, will step down at the end of this year. His work helped make a national institution possible where Black lives, achievement, suffering, resistance, and creativity belong at the center of the American story.

He says the administration’s pressure did not cause his decision. We respect his right to step away. The defense of honest history should never depend on one person’s willingness to endure an endless assault. But we will not soften what is happening around this departure.

The administration is pursuing political control over public history. Over what museums say, whose experiences they recognize, how historians interpret evidence, who oversees that work, and whether institutions receive support when they refuse to conform. Its executive orders, letters, and public statements spell out that campaign.

The histories under attack are not a mystery. Black and Indigenous history. Women’s history. LGBTQ+ history. People with disabilities. Labor unions. Immigrant communities.

Our history belongs to no administration. We owe the ancestors an honest accounting of their lives—and the future a chance to know the whole truth.

09/05/2026

Where is Ithamer Clark? Where’s his headstone?

One of many descendant inquiries we are pursuing presently. SOAL is seeking information, stories, and any potential leads re: the ITHAMER CLARK (1878–1941) family history.

Ithamer was born in Anderson County, South Carolina, to Samuel Clark & Alice Maxwell Clark.
The census places them in Martin Township when Ithamer is a small child and nearing teens in 1900. His father farmed and raised them in it.
They had a large family. Warren, Burley, William, Jeroam, Calhoun, Ada, Sarah. Eventually, some of those them begin appearing hundreds of miles north during the Great Migration.

By the World War I period, Warren Clark was in Harrisburg. By 1920, their widowed mother, Alice, was there too. In May 1920, Calhoun Clark married Eliza Colbert in Harrisburg.

Ithamer and Lois Moore married and had children in South Carolina. James Rosmond in 1913, Josephine in 1915, and John Henry in 1917. The family moved to Harrisburg before the roaring 20s.

Then, in on January 13, 1926, Lois Moore Clark died just three days after their daughter Annie Laura Clark was born. A birth and bereavement became part of the family history in the same week. Four years later, Ithamer is recorded in the census as widowed head of household.

Ithamer died in 1941 after a fatal fall down the stairs, at a house on Apple Street. He was survived by his mother, Alice, his brother Warren Clark, and nine children. Arrangements were handled by Charles W. Curtis Funeral Home.

Decades later, in the early 1990s, locals desecrated the Historic Lincoln Cemetery, using the burial grounds as a dirt bike course, which lead to the fence being built. We are following a lead that Ithamer’s headstone may have been moved following the dirt bike vandalism era. An old photograph, firsthand recollection, anything to help us locate their burials and family history.

Descendants have come out to SOAL Restorations. The family is searching for what happened to the headstone. We’re asking our community to help.

Family names connected: Clark, Maxwell, Deal, Anderson, Moore, Patterson, Cary, Corbin, Day, Daye, Jones, and Colbert.

We’re broadening the search. You don’t need a completed family tree to help. If you know a family branch we should explore—please share your stories, records, corrections, or leads. And pass this post along.

SOAL Ancestors’ Clark family record: https://ancestors.lincolncemetery.org/familygroup.php?familyID=F7634&tree=soalsearch

Ithamer Clark page: https://ancestors.lincolncemetery.org/getperson.php?personID=I20368&tree=soalsearch

09/03/2026

Sometimes an ancestor’s marker fits in the palm of a hand.

We regularly find shells at Lincoln Cemetery. In an inland Pennsylvania cemetery.

A small object may carry an expansive history.

Shells are documented features of African American burial grounds. Archaeologists have found oyster and clam shells associated with burials of African-born people and their descendants, sometimes connected to Gullah Geechee burial customs. Research has traced shells as a form of grave decoration across the African diaspora.

There was no single set of African deathways. Enslaved Africans came from many cultures with distinct languages, beliefs, spiritual systems, and practices surrounding death, burial, mourning, and ancestral relationships. The slave trade violently disrupted communities and kinship networks, but it did not erase African people’s capacity to preserve, create, and transmit meaning. Archaeological evidence shows that African-descended people retained, combined, revised, and sometimes concealed inherited ways of caring for their dead. These practices changed again through emancipation, migration, urbanization, Black church life, and encounters with European-American customs.

Preservation systems have traditionally privileged carved stone, orderly rows, clipped grass, and written documentation. The material language of well-funded predominantly White cemeteries. In contrast, shells, fieldstones, wooden markers, ceramics, and personal belongings have often been mistaken for debris. Shells and other objects may be historic grave markers that are no longer recognized as such.

The shells ask us to slow down. To recognize that a cemetery’s archive is not confined to written records or engraved stones.

It is also one of many reasons SOAL does NOT allow mowers at Lincoln Cemetery with no plan for protecting the delicate cultural resources preserved across this landscape. Lincoln is not an empty lot, and mowing is not merely groundskeeping. Shells, fieldstones, monument fragments, grave depressions, plantings, and other subtle features can be shattered or erased before anyone recognizes what they are. Every maintenance action requires careful observation, appropriate equipment, trained people, and a plan accountable to descendants.

09/01/2026

There is no shortage of endangered historic sites of Black history and heritage

The National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and The Conservation Fund's Legacy Places Initiative are partnering to advance the preservation and long-term protection of historically significant Black heritage sites across the United States. Each year, hundreds of these historic sites are lost as buildings and landscapes sit abandoned, forgotten or dismissed.

The partnership was inspired in part by our organizations' shared involvement with the historic Ben Moore Hotel in Montgomery, Alabama. The hotel was a rich cultural landmark for Black Americans living in Montgomery under Jim Crow. However, prolonged vacancy has led to the hotel's structural deterioration.

Acquired by The Conservation Fund in November of 2025, the Ben Moore Hotel was subsequently named one of the National Trust’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in America in 2026.

Under this new partnership, The Conservation Fund will secure at-risk African American heritage sites, and the National Trust will help advance those sites preservation efforts and long-term stewardship, creating a stronger pathway for their restoration and future reuse.

Learn more: https://ow.ly/kcMb50ZEUXR

09/01/2026

Join SOALat the 9th Slave Dwelling Project Conference in Charleston, South Carolina September 30th-Oct 3rd 2026!
Registration is open now!

https://slavedwellingproject.org/sdp-conference-2026/

There's going to be great presentations, a boat tour of the harbor, a sleepover at the International African American Museum, and great people to meet and learn from.

08/30/2026

SOAL is slated to talk and lead an interactive workshop at the 2026 The Slave Dwelling Project. We still need to raise some travel funds to cover 🔗 Rachael Keri Williams’ plane, room & board… https://linktr.ee/savingourancestorslegacy

Join us 🚨

South Carolina is fertile grounds for juxtaposing its Black colonial era scholarship with other colonies of that era. From 1708 when Blacks became the majority population in South Carolina, their presence has factored in significantly to this nation’s history.

South Carolina and other states have become more active in commemorating the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution. “250 Years and Counting: Reckoning, Resilience, and Remembrance,” will showcase South Carolina’s commitment to telling the complete story of its participation.

Theme: 250 Years and Counting: Reckoning, Resilience, and Remembrance.

🗓️ Date: October 1-3, 2026
📍 Location: North Charleston, South Carolina (and surrounding lowcountry areas)

⭐️Significant funding and support provided by the South Carolina 250th Anniversary Committee.

💻To register, visit https://slavedwellingproject.org

08/29/2026

What becomes history? That is a question underneath SOAL’s Rachael Keri Williams (2026) latest creation and poem.

Not just history institutions collect. Not just what archives catalog and what museums conserve. Not just what historians already know how to name.

Sometimes history is hiding in “grandma’s stuff.”

Boxes with saved bits of papers.
Church programs. Funeral cards. Photographs with names no one wrote down. Receipts. Letters. Military records. Newspaper clippings. Burial records. Objects in drawers. Boxes in basements. Things in the attic. Stories held by descendants. Fragments of evidence in lives lived, the unsung authors of history.

What can we learn from what gets routinely dismissed. Discovery in the leftovers of everyday life offering lessons on power and people. for Rethinking who decides what counts as history. Who decides what was/is trash? Who benefits from the parts extracted from culture and community? Who turned living memory into data, “the Blacks” artifacts, and profit with no accountability to the people who lived and made it?

SOAL refuses the disappearance of Black memory. We refuse the idea that Black history increases its value in erasure, or becomes valuable only after it leaves Black hands and stays unnamed. We refuse the notion that archives only live in institutions.

The archive is in the cemetery.
The archive is in the family boxes. The archive is in the church basement. It is in the ancestor’s name written sideways on a record never indexed correctly.

The archive is in the grave marker fallen, sunken & buried beneath three feet of soil that is recovered generations later by a group of descendants volunteering to save Black history in a forgotten burial ground. The archive is living in the descendant who recognizes a relationship no database could see. The archive is in the “stuff” your family almost threw away.

That is a fugitive pedagogy. Teaching from the places where power was not looking. Where power looked and still did not know what it was seeing. Where power took.

SOAL has learned that before names can be researched and repatriated, they sometimes must be physically recovered. Adding names & information to databases that others can search publicly. Before a person can be found in the archive, a headstone may have to be uncovered. Before the story can be told, the relationship has to be reconnected.

Action4Heritage carries that lesson outward. Because the crisis of public memory is not only historical. It is immediate. Records are being discarded. Archives are being closed. Cemeteries are being desecrated. Family collections & the elders who carry them are being lost. Public commitments to truthful history are under attack. Communities are being pressed to prove what we have always known.

There may be no justice. But there is just us.

What do you have? What has your family saved? What is sitting in a box, a drawer, a basement, attic, church closet, funeral home, a family Bible, your photo albums, or a hard drive? What has your community protected without anyone ever calling it preservation?

Do not let anyone tell you it is “just stuff.”

It may be the evidence.
It may be the lesson.
The missing name.
It may be the map back to someone’s people.
It may be futurity hidden in the Black midden.

Support SOAL and Action4Heritage as we build the tools, grassroots networks, and community-led plan to rescue endangered histories before they disappear.

Join us in saving America’s history. is

08/29/2026

08/29/2026

Stories of return.

Over the past few days, several descendants have come to Lincoln Cemetery looking for their people.

Yesterday, a descendant came who has lived in Harrisburg his whole life. And yet only learned about Lincoln Cemetery or that his ancestors were buried here within recent months.

He found them because he had begun searching his family history—and because genealogy that SOAL has spent years researching and sharing publicly on Ancestry and Find-a-Grave left a trail he could follow back to the cemetery.

So he came.

Names. Questions. Family connections still being worked out.

And standing there in the cemetery, Rachael was able to take him to one of his ancestor’s headstones. Others still in search of…

We keep thinking about what that means.

A person can spend a lifetime only a few miles from their ancestors and not know where they are.

Not because the connection does not exist.

Because the threads have been severed. The records scattered. Families displaced. Cemeteries neglected. Black neighborhoods erased. Knowledge lost between generations.

This is why SOAL’s work has never simply been about cleaning up an old cemetery.

We are rebuilding pathways home.

Every name entered into a publicly accessible database. Every burial record recovered. Every headstone pulled back from the earth. Every family connection shared publicly can become a thread somebody follows years later.

And sometimes they follow it all the way back here.

There was joy yesterday.

But there is a burden in these reunions too. Because when descendants return, they also encounter what has happened to the place entrusted with their people. They see the overgrown grass, the broken stones, the missing markers, the scale of the work still waiting for us.

We want more descendants to come home.
Come find your people.
Come tell us what you know.

Walk the ground.

Say their names.

And if this place belongs to your history too, help us carry it.

Not because descendants alone should be responsible for repairing generations of neglect. But because a living descendant community may be one of the most powerful things standing between these histories and disappearance.

There are countless more connections still waiting to be made.

Help us save all our ancestors’ legacy.