The Board of Directors, in agreement with the founder, established the organization for three basic reasons:
Access: Access to information online, while plentiful, is costly even when the economy is good.
Continuity: There are several hundred genealogy societies and groups that meet maybe once a month at the library or local courthouse for a genealogy review. Some of these groups are large in membership numbers and others are very small. Some genealogists are specialized in military records, while others are census gurus. There is little, if any at all, broad-based sharing of this knowledge with other researchers. This is due, in large part, to space and acceessibilty.
Urgency: For each day that we lose a senior in our community, we lose at least two, perhaps three generations of both physical and oral history. If historians and preservationist alike, allow the demolition of our historical sites and the desecration of our sacred burial grounds today, who is to say that 140 years from now historians won't dispute slavery in the United States as a myth? The future of our legacies are at risk today of being lost in perpetuity tomorrow. Our ancestors and descendants will measure our success in life not by the accumulation of wealth but rather by our level of consciousness and commitment to the preservation of their legacies.
CAAGRI is unique as we are more than just a genealogy research center. We are community activists. We are community sponsors. We are educators and historians who are passionate about our pasts and full of HOPE for our future.
Welcome to The Center for African American Genealogical Research, Inc.
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