Black Theatre Artists in Keene

Discovering the history of Charles Goins is a testament to digging into primary source material and questioning extracted metadata from repositories like FamilySearch and Ancestry. As I had begun entering collected census data from 1910, I noticed Charles Goins was recorded as “sniper” and “theater” for occupation in 1910. I’d never come across sniper as a historical occupation—at least not one recorded in a census. When going back to the original record, I realized that Charles Goins was a theater singer.

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