Frazine Taylor

Frazine Kennett Taylor (1945-2024) was a noted genealogist and historian of Black genealogy and author of the highly regarded book, Researching African American Genealogy in Alabama: A Resource Guide. Taylor served in the Peace Corps, worked at Tuskegee University, and was a long-time employee of the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH), as well as a member of many genealogical and historical organizations.

Taylor was born on March 21, 1945, to John Lee Jones and Martha Odessa (Blowe) Jones in Wetumpka, Elmore County. She was the second of three children and grew up in the Wallsboro community of Wetumpka. Her father served most of his career as the principal of Sandtown High School in Elmore County, retiring in 1972. Her mother taught school for 29 years, mostly also at Sandtown High School; she died in a traffic accident in 1997. Both parents earned bachelor’s degrees at Alabama State Teachers College (present-day Alabama State University, or ASU.), and he continued for a master’s degree. Taylor’s brother John Carver Jones was a U.S. Air Force veteran and was active in Black heritage activities in Elmore County. The youngest, Theron Rodell Jones, also served in the military.

Taylor attended the all-Black Southern Normal School in Brewton, Escambia County, for at least a portion of her early education because her parents wished to shield her from the complications of going to a school where she was the principal’s daughter. They also wanted to ensure high-caliber academic preparation for college. Before each term of her junior and senior years in high school, they dropped her at the Louisville & Nashville Railroad station for the semester. Southern Normal was a K-12 school founded in 1911 and drew students from many of the Deep South states. She graduated with 33 classmates on May 28, 1962. 

In the late 1960s, Taylor volunteered for the Peace Corps, hoping to improve the lives of people in a developing nation. To her disappointment, the corps assigned her to the Fiji Islands, a tropical paradise. In 1970, the Peace Corps assigned Taylor the task of recruiting from Black colleges in the South with the aim of increasing the number of Black volunteers within the organization. She remained with the Peace Corps until 1976, sending volunteers to overseas posts from the organization’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. During these years, she met and married Washington, D.C, native Donald Taylor, a graphic designer and father of five. He and Frazine had no children together; he died in 1994 of cancer. 

Taylor Conducting Research

Taylor earned a bachelor of science degree in business commerce from Knoxville College and a master’s degree in information studies from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), graduating in 1984. She had a passion for learning that she continued after her formal education. She took a job as a cataloguer for Tuskegee University's library and then interned for the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland, before she finally found her way to the ADAH in Montgomery, Montgomery County. She spent more than 20 years in service to the history community, beginnifng in the mid-1980s.

Taylor began with the solitary work of a book cataloguer, but ADAH leaders soon recognized her considerable interpersonal skills and reassigned her to the Research Room. As African American researchers began to seek information on their family histories, she became intrigued with genealogy and the special challenges it presented to those who descended from enslaved persons. With each challenge, she became more adept at finding the answers. The ADAH started to recognize that she was filling a whole new need for the department, in addition to her excellent knowledge of Alabama records. She began to develop workshops, though uncomfortable with public speaking, and put in extensive work to overcome that fear while improving her teaching skills. She also worked hard to recognize how material needed to be organized to best teach the audience at hand.   

She eventually found herself managing people at the ADAH. She was committed to serving the community and expected the same from her team, and she and supported new scholarship emerging from university scholars and independent researchers, much of it from materials she had helped them find. She also participated in many Black heritage organizations and understood why it was more comfortable and often more practical for African American stories to be presented in separate forums.

At the ADAH, she highlighted the many ways that Black Americans were being underserved by programming and record collecting and indexing. She found that previous indexers had assumed Black people would never do genealogy and had skipped indexing those marked “colored.” Overall, she provided information to many academic scholars, independent researchers, and hobbyists, Black and White, for their articles, dissertations, books, and genealogies.

After Taylor retired from the ADAH in January 2010, she expanded on her service to the many organizations and projects she had been involved with throughout much of her life. Like her parents, she was active in service to Mt. Canaan Missionary Baptist Church and community and continued to work in the areas of history, genealogy, and preservation. She served on the Black Heritage Council of the Alabama Historical Commission for 31 years, some as chair, and remained a member-at-large for the remainder of her life. She was the president of the Elmore County Association of Black Heritage, a role her brother John had occupied before her.

From 2004 until 2018, Taylor led the Researching African American Ancestry track at the Institute for Genealogy and Historical Research (IGHR). Although the IGHR initially feared such a course would not draw an audience sufficient to fund it, Taylor pushed for the track and recruited excellent faculty from around the country. Her course filled year after year, drawing Black and White students. After her retirement, the IGHR created the Frazine K. Taylor African American Research Scholarship making it possible for people of limited means to attend the course.  In 2016 and 2017 she served as president of the Friends of the Alabama Archives, the nonprofit group that helps promote and support the ADAH and its work.

In 2019, Taylor became the 72nd president of the Alabama Historical Association, its first African American president. A long-time member, she has been the only president so far who has served two years, because of the Covid pandemic. Also that year, the AHA honored Taylor with the coveted Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton Award for her special contributions to Alabama history. Indeed, Taylors’s lifetime of commitment to bringing people out of their “comfort zones” made AHA meetings a place where Black and White history scholars joined together in mutual respect to learn Alabama history from multiple perspectives. In September 2022, Taylor won the Dorothy Porter Wesley Award from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. In 2024, the AHA established the Frazine Taylor Research Grant, which is awarded every two years to graduate students researching Alabama history.

Taylor also served on the boards of the Patrons for the Study of Civil Rights and African American Culture at ASU, the Alabama Cemetery Preservation Alliance, and the Alabama Governor’s Mansion Authority, and helped with several major genealogy-related events during the Alabama Bicentennial. And, from 2012-19, she consulted on the Public Broadcasting Service genealogical television show Finding Your Roots, starring noted Black historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. She was an archivist and mentor at ASU’s Levi Watkins Learning Center several days a week, returning to her parents’ alma mater. ASU hosted her biennial genealogy colloquium, which draws researchers in African American family history from all over the country.   

In 2016, Taylor joined Donna Cox Baker, then-director of Alabama Heritage magazine, in establishing the Beyond Kin Project to assist and encourage the genealogical documentation of enslaved persons and slaveholders. They found that the people who had been drawn to it were a blend of Black and White genealogists.

Taylor died on July 24, 2024, after a period of declining health, and was buried at the Mt. Canaan Missionary Baptist Church in Wetumpka.