Donna Cox Baker (Ph.D., history) retired early from her career in historical magazine and book publishing at the University of Alabama to expand her side business, Golden Channel Publishing (GCP). She develops publications, tools, training, and methods to facilitate what she calls “genohistory”—the cross-disciplinary study of interconnected people, often families, in their own historical time and place. GCP’s premier site, Genohistory.com, encourages researchers to establish themselves at the crossroads “where genealogy and history converge.” Baker has written many articles and authored three books, coediting a fourth, representing both research disciplines. She is best-known for her book Zotero for Genealogy: Harnessing the Power of Your Research (2019), which teaches genealogists how to use this free software to gather, organize, cite, and analyze the research that precedes and expands beyond family tree fact-gathering.

Baker served as a committee cochair for the Alabama Bicentennial Commission’s three-year state and territorial commemoration activities, incorporating genealogy projects, including the digitization of state and local genealogical and historical society publications. She served as Vice President, then President, of the Alabama Genealogical Society. With Frazine Taylor, she also cofounded the Beyond Kin Project, an initiative that encourages the descendants of slaveholders to document the enslaved populations held by their ancestors. Supported by GCP, the Beyond Kin Project Facebook Forum now has over 3,000 members. She considers it to be one of the best examples of how genohistory expands the concept of interconnectedness beyond legal and biological kinship to present a more nuanced picture of ancestral worlds.

• 19th Century