Cooper Sims Project

  A Call To Home   G Burton Murphy  -21 July 2025 For the first time since my Grandparents arrived in California during the time of The Great Migration one of their own has traveled back to Houston, Texas to find what they left behind.   Meeting my maternal Grandfather’s youngest brother’s third son’s daughter, her Pop’s sister, Mister and son, and other kinfolk I didn’t have time to meet but heard about felt as though the family never parted.  This call to home hit different. Gone was the opportunity to beat the heat on a misty Mulholland drive. The high humidity of Galveston’s subtropical climate can curl your hair tighter and yet the warmth, generous spirit and infectious smiles held by the folks I encountered made the high humidity bearable. The decision to relocate, leave everything behind and possibly lose yourself in the process is a daunting task. Mustard seed faith may have provided my Grandparents with the wit and wisdom to leave home for parts un...

  How did African Americans Acquire Indigenous American Heritage? African Americans were initially separated from their identities when they became commodities of the Transatlantic Slave trade. Over the centuries, many Black Americans knew their ancestors came from Africa, but did not know the African country, Native groups, or culture their ancestors were a part of before arriving on the shores of North America. This loss of identity persisted on through the formation of the United States. During the Civil Rights Era, Black Americans began to reconnect with their West African roots, even if through a broad lens of African culture. As the Information Age expanded the access to various presentations of relevant historical research, African Americans became more informed on the West African countries and ethnic groups heavily affected by the slave trade’s forced migration of people to the New World. And technological advancements such as DNA testing, have helped the narrowing down of...

Cooper Sims Project was initiated by a trio of cousins on a genealogical journey. The Blog is named after a family patriarch, Henry Cooper Sims, who was part Choctaw and part British. Henry was married to a full-blooded Choctaw woman, with whom he had three children. One of their sons, Dr. William H. Sims of Muscogee, Oklahoma, was the great grandfather of this trio. Dr Sims and his wife, Alice Parthenia McClean Sykes, produced seven children. Their first born was lost in childhood, and their youngest child was not a live birth. The grandchildren of two of their sons, W. Henry Albert Sims and Harold John Sims, came together to uncover Henry’s life story, including his and his mother’s migration (she was born in Kentucky) his birthplace in South Carolina, on to Mississippi where he connected with his wife Ellen, then to Indian Territory not long after the Choctaw Trail of Tears. With this blog, the Sims grandkids intend to gather as many details related to Henry Cooper Sims as possibl...