Freedmen of the Frontier with Angela Walton-Raji

Angela Walton is a descendant of Choctaw Freedmen--former people enslaved in the Choctaw Nation, by Choctaw Indians. Since discovering her family records in 1991 at the National Archives, she has devoted herself over the years to research Freedmen from all of the former slave-holding tribes of Oklahoma. These are Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole Nations. She is the only nationally known genealogist  who has this specialty, and she had developed a unique perspective of telling stories about the former slaves--the Freedmen from these tribes.

Her new book is "Freedmen of the Frontier," which grew out of a project in 2017 where she documented 52 Freedmen families, over 52 weeks---the entire year. In 2018, she decided to turn those 52 blog posts into a 2-volume book set reflecting stories of these 52 families she profiled. She is a blogger, and podcaster and she claims both Arkansas and Oklahoma as her home states. She has a degree in Spanish from St. Louis University and a Master of Education from Antioch. She is currently working on a memoir about her journey to document the Oklahoma-based Freedmen, and her own African-Choctaw family. Her research continues at the National Archives in Washington DC, and also from Maryland where she continues to research and write.