In Memory of Ruth Anita Foote

The Ruth Foote Heritage Hub

Trace your line with genealogists and the registries, then record your family's story to keep forever.

Ruth Anita Foote, journalist, historian, and namesake of the Heritage Hub
Why the Hub Carries Her Name

She put us in the record.

Ruth Anita Foote was an award-winning journalist and public historian. She co-founded, edited, and published Creole Magazine. She wrote Just As Brutal But Without All the Fanfare, the story of the 79 Black students who desegregated Southwestern Louisiana Institute, and For Shakespeare's Stepchildren, her book on the craft of writing. When the King of Zydeco passed, Williams Funeral Home asked her to write Clifton Chenier's obituary. That tells you the trust she carried.

She earned her master's in public history and gave that work back to the region. She served as Vice President of the Bayou Vermilion District Board of Commissioners and Vice President of Move the Mindset. She began the Built On Zydeco essay and trusted us to finish it.

This Hub is where families trace their line and put their story on the record. Ruth spent her life doing exactly that for Creole Louisiana. That's why it carries her name. Ruth Foote never let us be left out of the record.

Genealogy · History · Oral History

Find your people. Put your story on the record.

The Ruth Foote Heritage Hub is where the day slows down and gets personal. Sit with genealogists and the leading Gulf Coast Creole registries to trace your line: the deep, interwoven lineages of African, Indigenous, and French ancestry in Louisiana.

For the last few years, the Hub has been anchored by presentations from genealogists. This year, we're doing something different, something that has never been done before as the presentation. We're holding the details close for now, but it's the kind of thing you'll want to be in the room for.

What won't change: our genealogists, historians, and seasoned family-history researchers will be here to sit with you one-on-one afterward. Bring your questions, your names, and whatever you've been trying to piece together. Follow the Creole Culture Day Event on Facebook to stay up to date as the details are revealed.

Ja'el “YaYa” Gordon, professional historian and genealogist
Special Presentation

Ja'el “YaYa” Gordon

We're honored to welcome back Ja'el “YaYa” Gordon as our featured genealogy presenter. After her impact last year, YaYa returns, volunteering her time and expertise to help our community uncover and preserve family histories.

YaYa is a professional historian, genealogist, and writer with more than twenty-five years of experience in archival research, the restoration of historic burial grounds, museum curation, and community education. She is a contractor with AncestryProGenealogists, contributes to ARRAY's Queen Sugar 101 Learning Companion, and has received grants from the SSRC and the Ford Foundation. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Jackson State University and has begun a second Ph.D. at Southern University at Baton Rouge, and is a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

What sets YaYa apart is her gift for making complex history personal. She meets people where they are, whether they arrive with a single family name or decades of records, and helps them find a way forward. After her talk, she'll be in the Ruth Foote Heritage Hub working one-on-one with families. Her return is a gift: a reminder that genealogy isn't only about the past, but about service to the present.

Lineage Panel Moderator

Joseph Dunn

Joseph Dunn moderates the Gulf Coast Creole lineage panel. He has spent more than thirty years at the highest levels of Louisiana's tourism and cultural industries. He served three years as Executive Director of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, and since 2014 has worked as an independent tourism and cultural entrepreneur. He now oversees communications, public relations and marketing at Laura: Louisiana's Creole Heritage Site, where he also works on research and on the interpretive narrative of the site.

Before that he held management positions at the Louisiana Office of Tourism, the Office of Cultural Development, the Office of the Lieutenant Governor, and the Consulate General of France in New Orleans. At CODOFIL he led the renegotiation of Louisiana's cultural and educational accords with France and Belgium, and in 2018 he was a lead contributor to the dossier that brought Louisiana into the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.

France made him a Chevalier de l'Ordre national du Mérite in 2021 and Québec inducted him into the Ordre des francophones d'Amérique in 2022. He has been Honorary Consul of Canada in New Orleans since January 2024, and he presents in English and French on the value of Louisiana's French and Creole heritage languages.

Joseph Dunn, moderator of the Gulf Coast Creole lineage panel
Inside the Hub

Who Yo People

An Oral History Archive by Vues de Culture

“Who yo people?” is the first question Louisiana asks you, before your name, before your job. At the Hub, families sit down and answer it on the record. Who Yo People is a Black Louisiana oral history archive, StoryCorps-style: you record your family's history in your own voice, and it's kept forever.

A family in its own voice can't be lumped, can't be flattened, can't be erased. Owned and run by Vues de Culture, built with the Gulf Coast Creole registries and preserved permanently in a university oral history archive.

Two Creole elders sharing a laugh at the Heritage Hub
Robyne Larking-Damond, MPH, PMP, genealogist and founder of The Kinstructure Company
Who Yo People

Robyne Larking-Damond, MPH, PMP

Robyne Larking-Damond, MPH, PMP, founded The Kinstructure Company, a Louisiana heritage preservation and genealogy business working with the Louisiana diaspora nationwide. The tagline is “Where Louisiana Finds Louisiana,” and the work is exactly that: helping people with Louisiana roots find each other and their family histories wherever they ended up. Heritage Discovery Sessions, custom family trees, KinStory memorial genealogy, and the Kinnect directory that connects Louisiana people across the country.

She began researching in 2008. She serves on the board of the Cane River Film Festival and holds memberships in the Association of Professional Genealogists and the National Genealogical Society. Outside genealogy she has spent more than eighteen years running large-scale public health and government programs, and currently leads a statewide Texas program making sure children and adults diagnosed with rare genetic disorders can get care.

That combination is the point. She brings the same rigor to a family's record that she brings to a state program. In her words, access to care, to knowledge, and to one's own history shapes how people live and thrive.

Record your family's story.

Sign-ups and recordings live at whoyopeople.org. Your story, kept forever, never for sale.

Visit Who Yo People →