Connecting with our Forgotten Past | William Keener

As we prepare to celebrate the sesquicentennial of Hickory, North Carolina next year, this talk will reconnect us to both the origins of this city and an uncomfortable past that has been largely forgotten.

William Keener is the current president of the Hickory Humanist Alliance and a member of the Board of Directors of the Catawba Valley Interfaith Council. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte with a degree in mathematics, William is a new grandfather who retired several years ago from a career in software engineering and support for a Fortune 100. Since then, he has been spending more time with his family and members of his community and researching and writing about his German paternal genealogy and local history in the Catawba Valley. His current project involves a locally notable distant cousin with a forgotten story from our collective past that we should remember well.