20. Amanuensis Monday: Sweet Aunt Cat

Catherine T. Harrison (1917-1999)

This is an oral history interview with Catherine T. Harrison, my great aunt, on February 12, 1996. Aunt Cat is the daughter of George Anderson Tucker and Daisy Chick Tucker. This is the first interview I had ever done. I was encouraged through a class I was taking at Chicago State University on African American genealogy by Tony Burroughs, a famous genealogist who recently appeared on the PBS Series African Ancestors' Lives.


Aunt Cat was very supportive and kept in touch always with family members. She was truly a family historian. From the information that she shared, I was able to eventually find the census records from 1870 to 1930 for the Chick-Tucker and Sims-Talley families.

 

Question: Where did you go to school?

Catherine Tucker Harrison: 


" I went to school back in Buffalo, South Carolina...a grammar school...at a little school that was about a mile from our home. I went to rural school. I was there from the first grade through the seventh grade. I was pretty alert, so my older sister, who is your grandmother, ...she was married then and living in Columbia, South Carolina, and so she took me to Columbia, South Carolina, and I started school in the eighth grade there at Booker T. Washington High School.


I finished high school there in 1937. Then after I finished high school, there was a college in the same town, Benedict College, and I enrolled in Benedict College. I spent four years there, and I graduated from Benedict College with magna cum laude. Then after that, I taught at various places in South Carolina."




Read more at Suite101: Interviewing Extracts Rich African American heritage