Joseph Phillippe Lemercier Laroche & Juliette Lafargue

Joseph Phillippe Lemercier Laroche (black, Haitian) married Juliette Lafargue (white, French). He died on the Titanic after ensuring the safety of his wife and their two children.

from: http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/titanic-biography/joseph-laroche.html

FGS Forum: "The Family Zuser"

There was a great article in the Winter 2004 issue of FGS Forum about a Russian Jewish family who emigrated to America in 1915 with two black South African girls, de facto adoptees of the family. The Family Zuser, as authors Valery Bazarov and Marian Smith call them, could not adopt Wilhelmina and Anna Jentjes according South African law. The article presents the original text of the mother's (Anna Zuser's) appearance before Board of Special Inquiry of the Bureau of Immigration explaining how her and her husband came to have custody of the children who looked nothing like her.

I found this site today, which may be of tangential interest to genealogists:

http://www.familydiv.org/ofmanycolors.php#exhibit



from the site: "Of Many Colors includes photographs and interviews with 20 families...who have bridged the racial divide through interracial relationships and/or adoption. In a world where race is considered by many to be a formidable barrier between people, the families in this traveling exhibit have discovered richness and value in diversity...Of Many Colors is also available in a beautiful companion book...published by the University of Massachusetts Press."

Native American family

Ok - let's start with this photo. I don't know who they are, but I thought it was a great photo of a Native American family with an African-American child. Could the child be a "Black Seminole"?

Introduction

This blog is called Interethnic Genealogy. It is about families that formed in history across ethnic lines. By ethnicity I mean of a particular racial, cultural, tribal, religious, linguistic or national group of persons. For example, African-Americans, Mormons, Indonesians, Swahili-speakers, white Americans, Sephardic Jews, Protestant Mexicans, Irish nationals, and Filipinos of Chinese ancestry are all viewed as distinct ethnic groups for the purposes of this blog, even though members of one group may in fact belong to one or more ethnic groups.The point is that families form across lines that societies draw.

The information in Interethnic Genealogy will be of interest primarily to family historians, or "genealogists", who are researching their own, a friend's or a client's multi-cultural family history, or who just find the subject interesting. A secondary focus of this blog is to present information from the social sciences that will help genealogists understand the social and cultural context of their ancestors' lives. If you have ancestry that crosses ethnic lines, understanding the worldviews of both groups will help you understand the lives of your ancestors.

It is also hoped that this blog will 1) foster an appreciation for the presence and contributions of ethnic and interethnic families in history (specifically American history, although not exclusively), and 2) promote a much needed understanding of the relevance of the social sciences to family history research (and vice versa).

While far from a comprehensive resource for researching interethnic families in history, I hope to eventually amass enough content to make this blog an interesting, educating and overall worthwhile read.