Antoinette Louise Broussard is a genealogist and writer. For 25 years she has developed her family trees. She’s discovered many living descendants who she did not know existed. A published author and public speaker, Antoinette is a woman of multi-racial heritage, who’s committed to the pursuit and documentation of her ancestral roots. She believes that everyone deserves to know where and whom they come from. Three of her great-grandfathers were European and the fourth was African. Broussard is the second generation born and raised in Oakland, California from a family who descended from below the Mason-Dixon line—in Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Texas, and Virginia.
A dedicated genealogist, Antoinette’s affiliations include the National Genealogy Society (NGS), and local societies in areas of her family research. She’s a board member of the African American Genealogical Society of Northern California (AAGSNC), where she has presented lectures at the FamilySearch Centers in both Oakland CA and in Sacramento, CA. She’s written for AAGSNC’s journal, “The Baobab Tree”. Antoinette is also a member of Our Black Ancestry, the African American Genealogy Group of Kentucky (AAGGKY), The Leavenworth Historical Society, LaCreole of New Orleans, Southwest Louisiana Creole Genealogy, Genetic Cousins Research, and numerous other research groups. Her public speaking appearances about her genealogical research can be viewed on YouTube.
Since she was a ten-year-old, Antoinette has been influenced by an oral history told to her about her maternal great-grandmother, Violet. It’s the core of her current book project, “Violet’s Honor: History Meets Personal Journey“. A family memoir from 1795 to present, it weaves twenty-five years of the author’s genealogical research with the stories found in her maternal grandfather’s meticulously typed manuscripts on onionskin paper, gifted to Antoinette by her mother. Broussard was unaware that her grandfather, Berry Craig, born in 1863, had been a writer. He described his mother, Violet, escaping her enslaver’s Missouri farm, pregnant, with her six children, and fleeing across the Missouri River into Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1865. Berry Craig’s stories led Antoinette on a journey to search for her identity, and she found discoveries about other relatives along the way.
Antoinette is a member of Coming To The Table: Taking America Beyond the Legacy of Enslavement. They are a national group that pursues truth, justice and healing through stories. She contributes stories about her family to their blog, “Bittersweet: Linked Through Slavery“. Broussard penned the chapter, “Stateline”, in the book, “Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation“, edited by Dionne Ford and Jill Strauss, Rutgers University Press, in 2019. It described her journey about researching her family’s former enslaver who was her biological great-grandfather, and the subsequent meetings she had with his living descendants. Broussard wanted them to know her line existed; it wasn’t invisible.
At her heart, Antoinette is a writer. In “Everything Has Its Place Anthologies I-V ” by The San Leandro Writer’s Group, edited by Sandra Rogers-Hare, Antoinette has written about events that chronicled her life, including “To Begin Again“. She has contributed stories to the “Bittersweet Blog“, “Embracerace.org”, Slavery’s Descendants Anthology, and BlackPast.org (The University of Washington). As a teacher, she taught a “Document Your Life Class”, for seniors through Saint Mary’s College, in Moraga, CA.
Antoinette has done extensive work in the media. For the travel TV show, “Days With Zahrah”, hosted by Zahrah Farmer on the Bay Area’s ABC-7 channel, Antoinette was a co-producer. She was a researcher and writer for the book, “The Best Places to Eat, Play, and Stay in the Bay Area“. For the show’s production company, Madrone Street Television, Broussard co-produced documentaries on Oakland firefighters. These included “Confirming Stills: In the Town“, a movie that takes you into a day and life of an Oakland Firefighter (2020); and “Behind the Station Door: Celebrating 100 years of African Americans and 40 years of women in the Oakland Fire Department” (2023). Oakland was one of the first fire departments to integrate in the US. Broussard also participated in the film “East Oakland Counter Narratives” (2022), directed and produced by filmmaker Cheryl Fabio. The film is described as “..a place based homage to Black families that have rooted in East Oakland, since the 1950s.”
Antoinette is a graduate of The Protocol School of Washington, DC. She was Ms. Etiquette on a San Francisco cable show when she founded “L’Ecole d’etiquette“, a finishing school and etiquette program for children, teen-agers, and adults in the 1990s. “Business Etiquette” clients included a diverse group of companies, including San Francisco’s Crocker Galleria, the McDonald’s Corporation, the United States Postal Service, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, The Links, Inc., Jack and Jill of America, Hastings Law School, and many others. Antoinette has written articles and had speaking engagements on international protocol.
At 50 years old, she returned to college to make good on her education. She graduated with an Associates degree in Interior Design from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, in San Francisco. At 56 she earned a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Black Studies from San Francisco State University; and at 70 years old she achieved a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California. She lives in Fairfield, California, and is the mother of three children and grandmother of four.
Antoinette Broussard 