I have spent the past few months doing a deep dive into the early colonial enslavement of my Varina, Henrico County, Virginia Bates line. My connection to this family is via my great grandmother, Julia Ella Bates Roane, the mother of my paternal grandmother, Susan Julia Roane Thomas Sheffey.
DNA tells a story of a genetic connection to many of the oldest enslaving families in Henrico – as well as up and down the James River: Bates, Bolling, Christian, Fleming, Jordan, Piersey, Pleasants, Price, and Woodson. Julia’s DNA also connects me to some of the known and unknown 20-and-odd Africans who were brought to this part of colonial Virginia in 1621 such as Cornish, Johnson, and Gowen/Goins/Goings. This makes sense through the prisms of time and location. My Bates and allied family lines were in Varina from the beginning of the colonial period of Virginia…and never left. Their DNA mixed with the DNA from the other old Varina and James River families down the centuries.
I know the where, how and the why behind my connections to these families: slavery. Centimorgans (cMs) and SNPs have provided a solid glimpse into when this DNA became part of my genetic makeup (mid-to-late 17th Century and early 18th Century).
In some instances, I even know who contributed this DNA to my genetic inheritance. Not enough, however. Too few instances, if I’m honest. Hence the past few months have been spent trying to unravel the story behind the forgotten individuals who form this part of my ancestry. This has meant delving into and stitching together a patchy paper trail of probate records for the enslaving families tied to this family history and ancestry, deeds of sale and deeds of gifts, letters, farm books, journals – any available puzzle piece that could shed light on this research.
You should expect a few detours when you do research of this nature. Detours are part and parcel of the work we do as genealogists and family historians. In my experience, I’ve rarely found these detours to be a waste of time. Typically, for me, they reveal something important. This is one of those instances.
There I was, chipping away at adding Bolling family enslaved people (EPs) to my tree when I came across deeds of sale between a John Bolling and Thomas Jefferson. John Bolling married Thomas’s sister, Martha. It made sense that EPs would pass between the two of them.
Again, the purpose of this article is how to apply different strategies in researching enslaved ancestors. It isn’t a commentary on the selling of human beings. If I use language that may seem insensitive, just know I don’t mean it to be. Trust me, I have plenty of skin in the game. I can only write about researching enslaved people because I have ancestors who were enslaved. So please, don’t get hung up on language. It’s the research methodology that’s the subject.
In order to understand the history of the EPs Thomas Jefferson sold to his brother-in-law, John Bolling, I needed to find out more about them while they were with Jefferson. I was able to achieve this via discovering a digitized copy of Jefferson’s Farm Book: a ledger where he noted all manner of things about the EPs held by him. It is genuinely a genealogical goldmine in terms of Jefferson EP family research.
Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, available through The Massachusetts Historical Society via
It was time to add Jefferson’s hundreds of EPs to my family tree. Their details came straight from his Farm Book. Sally Hemings’ immediate and extended family were already in my tree as they were a known family from our common Wayles link. She and her Fossett, Brown, Bell, and Colbert kin have been exceedingly well documented. There were no new revelations to be found there with regard to her family.
This time around, I was focused on Jefferson’s EPs who worked the land. These are the lesser known and researched of his EPs. Some of these EPs were my kin via transactions with other enslaving families who were my ancestors or kin. Families like Christian and Woodson.
The first thing I had to tackle where numerous EPs with the same first name. When you’re dealing with one name ancestors, this is a nightmare.
Take the name Suckey, for instance. There were around two dozen entries in Jefferson’s Farm Book for different Suckeys. Thankfully, Jefferson was pretty consistent in the details he provided for many of the Suckeys in this book. It appears there are at least 6 Suckeys covering three generations. There may be a seventh and an eigth Suckey – I’m still trying to work out if these last two Suckeys are different women from the 6 known Suckeys or just poorly notated Suckeys from the 6 who are known.
Were all of the known Suckeys related? Four of them were: mother, daughter, a grand-daughter and a niece. I suspect the other two Suckeys are related to this family group based on what they named their children. However, Jefferson didn’t provide information about either of these two Suckey’s parents or siblings. I suspect both are additional nieces to the eldest Suckey (“Old Suckey”) via unknown or undocumented siblings of Old Suckey.
When it comes to this kind of research, naming patterns matter.
I’ll give you another example. It’s an example I’m currently working on.
While reading about Jefferson and his EPs, I came across some accounts in history books about how the British stole a number of Jefferson’s EPs in Cumberland County, Virginia during the Revolutionary War. It turns out these EPs weren’t stolen. They actually fled to the British in a bid for freedom. But more on that at another time.
Once I entered the details of the EPs who fled to the British to my tree, the relationship between a number of them was immediately appraent. One of Jefferson’s enslaved families made a bid for freedom:
Emanuel and Patt’s bid for freedom, along with their children’s, did not end well. With the exception of Isabel and her brother Peter, the rest of the family died in the British encampment. Emanuel died of cholera – one of the hazards of military camps of the time. The other being typhus. I can only presume cholera is what killed Patt and most of the children.
Keep the names Sam and Sall in the back of your mind.
Two other family groups who lived among Emanuel and Patt’s family also fled to the British in Cumberland County at the same time. Note their names:
So…we have Sall (“Black Sall”) and a Sam who also fled to the British. Emanuel and Patt had children by these names. Is there a connection between these 3 family groups? My instincts say yes. What does the paper trail say? The jury is out. So far, nothing on paper proves or disproves a family connection.
Looking at this logically, fleeing to the British as an enslaved person wasn’t easy. Add the fact you were taking young children with you. On the one hand, Emanuel and Patt probably thought the disruption of war would provide the best chance of escape, and ultimately, freedom. They may have thought this was their only, best hope for freedom. So they planned. And planned some more. What they were planning, if they were caught planning it, would have landed them in a world of hurt. At the worst, if discovered, their entire family could have been split up and sold away from each other. My cousin Thomas Jefferson had form for this. So it was a genuine possibility and a reasonable fear.
With stakes this high, Emanuel and Patt wouldn’t have told just anyone. The risk of someone alerting Jefferson or the overseers was just too great. If you were bound to disclose such plans at all, you’d only do such a thing with people you trusted with your life, which would include family.
It’s for this reason I don’t believe that it’s a coincidence that Black Sall and Sam joined Emanuel and Patt when they fled their bondage. Little Sally and little Sam were named for an aunt and an uncle – a naming practice that is entrenched in this part of my ancestry.
The question remains who, precisely, Black Sall and Sam were related to. Were they Emanuel’s siblings or Patt’s. I don’t have an answer for that yet.
The elder Sall, Black Sall, may be the answer to a question that I have. Little Isabel and Peter lost their entire immediate family while encamped with the British. They were young, both under the age of 12. So how did they get back to Jefferson? I believe that the elder Sall brought them back along with her surviving children. Sall’s two youngest daughters died in the British army camp. Little Jamey was ill. Perhaps some of her surviving children were ill too. She was ill. Weighing her options, perhaps she believed returning to Jefferson was the best chance for the survival of her remaining children, and possible neice and nephew. At this stage, I have no doubts that she was the person who brought Isabel and Peter back to Monticello. Truly, Sall was faced with a dire choice.
Sall died of cholera herself shortly after her return. Her surviving children would all be passed to Jefferson’s son-in-law, John Wayles Eppes. I’m still researching them to find their descendants in order to see the surnames they went by. Seeing the surnames used by the descendants of her son, Billy Warny (I believe his surname was actually Warner, not Warny), if he had any, would shed some light on how this family group would have identified itself.
Emanuel and Patt’s surviving son, Peter, will also provide clues in this regard. His trail has been difficult to pick up once he returned to Jefferson. There are too many indistinguishable Peters for me to be certain if he’s the Peter who went to Thomas Mann Randolph, the one who went to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, or the one who went to John Wayles Eppes. Or the Peter who was sold outside the family. He may be one of these Peters – or none of them.
Researching EPs means working with limited information in more cases than I’d like to think about. It means working from the known to the unknown…and then using critical thinking to bridge gaps. Which this article illustrates.
So what are the next steps?:
Finding the estate inventory for Peter Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson’s father). I have his Will, which cites a scant few EPs. What I need is his complete estate inventory which would list all of his EPs, with possible ages and family relationships cited. This will hopefully show how Black Sall and Sam were related to either Emanuel or Patt;
Finding the estate inventories for Jane Randolph, Thomas Jefferson’s mother, for the reasons provided in Point #1. Again, I have her Will, it’s the estate inventory that’s needed;
The 1823 estate inventory for John Wayles Eppes, to pick up the story of the EPs he received from Jefferson; and
The estate inventories for John Blair Bolling (aka John William Bolling), and his wife, Martha Jefferson, to pick up the trail of the EPs they received from Jefferson.
All this to figure out how, exactly, my Varina, Henrico County, Virginia family is genetically connected to some of the EP families coming from Jefferson’s various farms and properties. Deeds between Jefferson, the Bollings, the Christians, and the Woodsons are the hows. Now, it’s a matter of tackling the who.
It may be the mother of all detours, however, I see how it leads back to Varina. Time, perserverance, and patience will reveal the specifics. In that, I have absolute faith.
The Moses Williams Project Article: A Genealogy Adventure with Slave and Supercentenarian Moses Williams | San Diego Free Press
Donya Williams, the four-times great-granddaughter of a man named Moses Williams, asked me if I would help draw attention to some research she and a cousin are doing titled: Stronger Together: The Moses Williams Genetic Genealogy Project.
So I started reading a bio she sent me of their work and can’t help but think they already know what they’re doing.
I was barely into reading other information when the names Strom Thurmond, 50 Cent, Al Sharpton, and L.L. Cool J jumped out at me – names I wouldn’t ever expect to appear in the same sentence.
I mean what could a white Southern senator who loves the KKK and a man who raps, “There’s no business like ho business” and a melodramatic Baptist preacher “Keepin’ it Real” and the creator of “Mama Said Knock You Out” possibly have in common?
Well, they’re all from Edgefield, South Carolina. And they’re all in one way or another related to the cousins. When this project is completed I want to hear that story.
Diversity. It’s a word that packs one heck of a punch. It has the power to evoke passionate reactions across the conservative to progressive spectrum of thought. For clarity, in the course of this article, when I refer to diversity I speak of the diversity of experiences in ancestral and family history research.
I began my ancestry journey around a decade ago. Like any novice, back then, I made some basic assumptions about that journey. I expected to have a magnificent tree composed of distinctly different family branches. Then I discovered my Quaker, Puritan, and Scots-Irish frontier ancestors…ancestors who married their cousins over and over and over again due to reasons of religion and/or isolation.
I still have a magnificent family tree. It’s just a tree with many, many inter-locking, deeply entwined, and linked branches. It’s not a unique tree by any means. It’s the kind of tree that is actually fairly common for Americans with deep colonial era roots. However, the big online genealogy services have a product in the form of online family tree building which doesn’t reflect this. It’s a dissonance that can be exceedingly frustrating for reasons I’ll cover in a bit. This is one example of genealogical diversity based on cultural differences.
A number of my colonial female ancestors married young. They were far from unique. I know that 14 or 15 was a very young age for an ancestor to begin having children. However, for a Scots-Irish girl in the Appalachian Mountain region, that was just part and parcel of every day life: marry young and starting a family. Automated error messages from family tree building sites informing me that these girls in my family were having children ‘before their child bearing age’ aren’t really helpful. That was the world they lived in back in the 17th and 18th Centuries. My 20-something times great-grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry Tudor (Henry VII of England), was 12 years old when she married Edmund Tudor. She was a mother by 13 years old.
Now, I’m happy this is no longer the case. Today, girls and young women have options a 17th Century girl could have never dreamt of, less imagined. This is another form of diversity within genealogy: the diversity of basic life experiences, societal customs, and gender.
When I touch on the topic of diversity within genealogy it’s not about political correctness. It’s about a true, honest, and candid recognition of history – without prejudice, air brushing, or white washing the bits of history we don’t like; or would much rather forget. The only way I can truly glimpse my ancestors and ancestral kin is through seeing them in-situ, residents of the society and distinct cultures their lives played out within.
I hope these examples illustrate that I won’t be tackling the subject of diversity within genealogy along the lines some might have assumed I would.
The Moses Williams Family Tree Project
Following on from my previous article, Genealogy Challenge: Researching the 43 enslaved children of Moses Williams (Old Ninety-Six, South Carolina (https://genealogyadventures.net/2017/03/24/genealogy-challenge-researching-the-43-enslaved-children-of-moses-williams-old-ninety-six-sc), this research project is well under way. And again, my apologies for future gaps in publishing articles in the near future. Every time I sit down to outline an article, one of this project’s researchers finds a record that sends the whole team down the genealogical version of a rabbit hole. Writing tends to take a back seat. When it comes to genealogy, you have to ride whatever line of discovery which presents itself when it presents itself. You never know if you can ever return to a specific set of circumstances which led to a discovery trail should you decide to stop and return to the research later. When the ancestors point the way…we follow.
The Moses Williams project is composed of a few phases:
Phase 1: Finding the enslaved children of my 4x great-grandfather, Moses Williams (1756, York, Virginia-1884, Barnwell, South Carolina) in North Carolina and South Carolina, and tracing their lines of descent;
Phase 2: Identifying Moses’s siblings and extended family in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina;
Phase 3: Tracing his extended enslaved family’s line from Texas up through Tennessee and Kentucky, over to Virginia in the east, then south through Georgia.
The probate records, tax records, and deeds of their Williams family enslavers (who were also their kin), form the bedrock of this research. We’re talking building a family tree of enslaved people within the depths of the American chattel slavery period. There will be no marriage records to consult. Other than a few mid-19th Century Mortality Schedule entries, there won’t be death records. Nor will there be Antebellum newspaper articles, unless one of these ancestors ran away; or committed some deed, usually negative, to warrant appearing in print. Nor will they have surnames. The rules of what we consider traditional genealogy do not, and will not, apply.
The major family tree/ancestry services need to not only be transparent about this – they need to address this within their respective services, and the very coding that drives their respective platforms.
In the very early days of this project, I went the old school pen and paper route.
A working example of diagramming information about enslaved people from documents
I diagramed the movement of enslaved people from one Williams family member to another. Every deed, every Will, every estate inventory, and every tax record citing enslaved people received it’s own diagramed work-up. I would make notes linking individual enslaved people from transaction to transaction. I had dozens of sheets of paper in no time at all. Which was fine for me. However, I needed to share this information with an entire research team. Creating a PDF document from dozens of scanned pages wasn’t going to cut it.
This project needed to go online. It also needed to be accessed, added to, edited/corrected by all of the researchers in real time. Everyone needed access to add vital research records, leave notes, or comments for the other researchers to see. The team also needed to post queries for the other researchers to follow up on. We also needed to see Moses’s family members within a family or group context to better enable us to make important connections.
Enter Ancestry.com. It made sense to build this very unconventional tree using Ancestry:
All of the research team were Ancestry.com members;
The majority of records we would need were on Ancestry; and
Having a public project tree would mean it would be easily discoverable by Williams family descendants who might have missing puzzle pieces to contribute.
I knew this would be an unusual family tree from the beginning. Typically, genealogists work from the present backwards through time. This tree works from the past to the present. On the majority- European side of the family, the tree starts with the family’s immigrant ancestor, John Williams, Sr, who arrived in Virginia during the early years of that colony. He is the anchor ancestor. From him, we can trace the movement of enslaved people from one generation to the next within the family. Well, we can once my contact in London can find a copy of John’s colonial York County, Virginia Will in the American Colonial Records Archive in the British National Archives. Sadly, the original in Virginia was either destroyed or lost.
I will readily admit I was stuck on how I wanted to add enslaved people to this tree. Ancestry.com wasn’t built with this in mind. I made all manner of outlines on paper. I wasn’t happy with any of them. Three very long phone conversations with Ancestry.com didn’t shed any light on how I could tackle this either. While the people I spoke to at Ancestry were pleasant and curious about the project, none could offer any suggestions as to how I could accomplish it. Basically, they thought it was impossible.
Present me with ‘impossible’ and I’ll take that as a personal challenge to find a work-around solution. My solution might not be elegant or pretty…but it will get the job done. It’s what I do.
Providentially, I received an invite to join a Facebook group called The Beyond Kin Project (https://www.facebook.com/beyondkin). This ingenious project encourages and facilitates the genealogical documentation of enslaved populations. It has growing participation from descendants of enslavers, people who want to share vital information that will assist descendants of enslaved people, to support their descendants’ genealogy research. Descendants of enslaved people also share the documents they have found during the course of their research. By the way, I would like to give a shout out to Donna Cox Baker, one of this project’s co-founders. Donna has a brilliant genealogy blog that is well worth checking out: The Golden Egg Genealogist via http://gegbound.com.
Beyond Kin had an ingenious methodology for tackling adding enslaved people into an overall family tree format on Ancestry. My synapses were fired up. Once I understood the project’s approach, I was able to easily adapt it for the Moses Williams Project.
I’m not going to get into the step-by-step approach on how to build a tree like this one. You can see the Beyond Kin methodology on their website and Facebook group. Suffice to say it shares the same basic challenges as the Moses Williams Project. There is no straightforward way of tackling these problems. Both projects do the best they can will the tools available at the moment.
I will do a “how to” guide for our project once I work out some of the technical foibles, glitches, and eccentricities of creating a tree like this on a service like Ancestry. Suffice to say it’s a long, labour-intensive, time-consuming, and complicated process. For now, the current project team is getting the research job done.
Let’s look at two working examples from our tree below:
Here we have Daniel Williams, a man (and a direct ancestor) whose descendants in South Carolina figure so largely in the story of my 4x great-grandfather Moses Williams and his family. The first part of Daniel’s page looks like any other ancestor’s page on Ancestry. There are his vital details. His parents are there (one note: his father shouldn’t be cited as “The Wealthy Welshman”. This is an historic Williams family error. We’ve left this mistake in the project tree for the simple reason that this is how he’s referred to by many of his descendants. While an error, it makes him easy to identify among a staggering number of John Williams in the family).
We also see Daniel’s wife and children.
It’s the second half of his page where things become unconventional. Key records like Wills, estate inventories, and Deeds are added as spouses. We then change the relationship between the record and the enslaver it’s attached to from ‘spouse’ to’friend’. This removes any biological connection between the record/document and the person it’s attached to. The enslaved individuals associated with each record are attached to the relevant records they appear within as ‘children’. We then change the ‘childrens’ relationship to the document and the enslaver to a non-biological category, ‘guardian’.Creating duplicates, and then merging them, allows me to have a single page for each enslaved individual – and add them, again and again, for each and every Williams family member who held them in slavery.
This approach allows the team to see each individual in context, see all of the Williams family members they were associated with…and the other enslaved people who they left behind as well as those who went with them to their new destination.
Seeing them in this way enables us, and will continue to enable us, to identify who were part of their family; as well as identify those enslaved people who were not a part of their family.
For instance, a few things have already become apparent. There were two distinct groups of enslaved people who were kept within the Williams family.
The first group were enslaved people who were always kept within the Williams family. Their descendants, and their descendants, were also held within the Williams family. DNA strongly suggests the enslaved who continued to be held by the family were its blood relations.
The second group were enslaved people who were sold to people outside of the family. The team surmises these were not blood kin to the Williams family. Deeds of sale are beginning to support this hypothesis. The enslaved people who were bought by the Williams from outside the extended family are tending to be the same enslaved people who were sold to people outside of this family.
The exception are the instances where a Williams died intestate, without a Will. Estate sales in this instance seemed to have been something of a free-for-all. However, we’ve noticed members of the immediate and extended family acquired specific groups of enslaved people when such an estate sale happened. They were buying enslaved people we either know, or strongly suspect, were their black relations.
We wouldn’t be able to make these connections and associations without a family tree like this project’s tree.
Daniel is a pretty straightforward example to illustrate. He has only one known document to work with thusfar: his Will.
Things become substantially more complex with his grandson, Maj. John Williams:
For starters, there are all manner of enslaved – related documents associated with John. Some of his Deeds were provisional – meaning they were never enacted – while others were finalized. It’s taking quite a bit of time working out which of his deeds were enacted and which ones were not. This is important in determing where enslaved people were at a given point in time.
We can also see he seems to have held far more enslaved people than his father, Daniel. Working out which of these enslaved were originally held by the family in previous generations, and which were brought in from outside of the family, is going to take time.
We also need to determine how the different groups of the enslaved would have identified themselves. Not all of them were Williams. I already suspect other family groups in the above image will include Caldwell, Martin, Griffin, Deloa(t)ch, Hightower, Higgins, and Smith family members.
Here’s another example, this time using an enslaved person’s Ancestry page:
One of the key pieces of information we add to an enslaved person’s page are the documents in which their names appear. We treat records like these like a census record. These documents usually have dates and locations. For Cuba, for instance, her name first appears (for now) in 1833 as part of John W. Williams household. John, as it turns out, died intestate in Edgefield County, South Carolina. His widow, Ann Freeman Martin-Williams bought Cuba, and Cuba’s children, during the sale of her husband’s estate.
We know that Cuba and her children were in Edgefield, South Carolina in 1833. And again in 1847, when Ann Freeman Martin-Williams died. And again in 1858, when Ann’s estate sold Cuba and her children to Ann and John’s three daughters. Knowing where each enslaver – family member lived pinpoints the precise location where Cuba and her children were living. It makes things easier when searching for Cuba’s children in the 1870 Census, the first census where formerly enslaved people are recorded in their own right.
Using a tree like this facilitates this kind of research like nothing else I can think of.
It’s why understanding, accepting, and supporting diversity in genealogy matters. There’s no getting around it. Online genealogy services are actively marketing to the descendants of enslaved people without really offering a more streamlined way for those descendants to grapple with building research trees. That’s just for starters. Like Native American genealogy, black American genealogy is distinctly different from European-American genealogy the further back in time we go. In many ways, when it comes to enslaved ancestors, each and every one is like researching an adoptee, or an orphan with no known ancestry. That’s another aspect of diversity within genealogy.
Thisis especially true in a time when such services are specifically advertising their genealogy services to Americans with ancestors who were enslaved.
There is another reason for these services to truly address diversity. These are the category choices the team is faced with when adding enslaved people to our project tree:
The standard relationship definitions used by genealogy service providers don’t adequately address researching enslaved ancestors
None of the classifications in the image above are appropriate in defining the link between an enslaver and the enslaved. Doing the best we can with the tools we have via Ancestry, we use ‘Guardian’. It’s part of eliminating any biological links between an enslaved person and the enslaving family when no such connection exists. It’s the best classification to use in order for this project tree to work properly. However, it isn’t appropriate. Not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s not just Ancestry. Every online family tree building site is like this.
With a growing number of descendants of enslavers wanting to share information from records they have, for every project like the Beyond Kin Project and the Moses Williams Family Tree Project, and for every descendant of enslaved people who join a family tree building site due to marketing/advertising…this issue needs to be addressed. This is especially true when marketing ancestry services to specific groups of people.
The question should always be, do we have a service that meets a specific demographic’s ancestral research needs? In other words, looking at your genealogy service through their eyes, and honestly assessing what their experience of such a service will be.
Diversity, in this instance, is about recognizing difference in genealogical experiences. Plus looking at, and experiencing, the genealogy journey not from the service provider’s lens of its genealogy experience – but through the lenses of its diverse customer base. In this instance, I feel certain there are black genealogists, and black genealogy project founders, who would be only too pleased to act as consultants for the big genealogy services. All these companies need do is reach out, and ask.
The draft journal paper below was produced in answer to a general call for papers on the subject of Reparations in the US. Myself, and my cousin, Donya Williams, address the subject through the lens of genealogy.
The draft version of our paper is provided in two formats: an embedded PDF document and widget that you can either read online, or download. A text version follows beneath the embedded PDF widget.
Since the beginning of man’s life on earth, the family has served as the cornerstone of society. The integrity of the family set the standard for society from the beginning of time as the underpinning of our civilization, reflecting the beneficial differences between men and women and the complementarity of their hearts, minds, and bodies. Aristotle argued that the natural progression of human beings flowed from the family via small communities out to the polis. The state itself, then, as a natural extension of the family, mirrors this critical institution.”[i][ii]
And:
The family is the entity that gives real meaning to life and to existence. The family is the cornerstone of the social system. The family is not a casual or spontaneous organization of people but a divinely ordained group. Marriage is noble and sacred, a social contract that confers mutual obligations on the couple and society. The progress and welfare of society, or its breakdown, can be traced to the strengths and unity, or the lack of it, in the family. This also applies to civilization…
The family has an important role in providing socialization and values for children and in providing social and economic security as well. Being part of a family motivates individuals, motivates us all, to work hard, sacrifice our well-being, and work for the welfare of the family.
In all faiths and religions, the family is the foundation of society. The peace and security offered by a stable family unit is greatly valued and considered central for the spiritual growth of its members, society, and humanity. The harmonious social order is created by the families and extended families in which all children are treasured, valued, and nurtured.[iii]
There are established arguments in support of, and against, descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States receiving reparations[iv]. The arguments in favor of reparations are based upon the economic advantage slavery provided the United States[v]; the brutal conditions of slavery[vi]; and the social, political, judicial, and economic disenfranchisement of African Americans. [vii]
A common argument against reparations cites the indigenous practice of slavery within the African continent. We acknowledge that the practice of slavery in Africa was ancient and well established by the Europeans began to export human beings from that continent. However, it differed greatly from the form of chattel slavery that existed with America with the arrival of Europeans.
In Africa, many societies recognized slaves merely as property, but others saw them as dependents who eventually might be integrated into the families of slave owners. Still other societies allowed slaves to attain positions of military or administrative power. Most often, both slave owners and slaves were black Africans, although they were frequently of different ethnic groups.[viii]
In the American system, slavery was a condition that was not only held for life, it was passed down through the generations via the status of the mother, codified by the laws of the individual states. It was a brutal birthright. This paper illustrates the profound and destructive force this peculiar form of slavery would have on the authors’ enslaved ancestors in Edgefield County, South Carolina. The authors will demonstrate the effects the American slavery system had upon the most fundamental aspect of the human experience – an attack on the fundamental building block of society – the family.
Lewis Matthews by Brian Sheffey
Image courtesy of Mr T. Dabney
My maternal 3x great grandfather, Lewis Matthews, was born in 1824 in the Blocker region of Edgefield County, South Carolina. He was the son of an unknown slave woman and her owner, Drury Cook Matthews (1760-1830). Born to a slave, he inherited his mother’s slave status from the moment he first drew breath. Despite being sired by his owner, he maintained the status of a slave until freed through the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.
Apart from an oral tradition among the Matthews (including Mathis family members) still residing in Edgefield, little is known about Lewis’s life. What kind of man was he? What was his nature? What were the quirks and foibles that made him individual? These questions are part and parcel for any genealogist. When it comes to researching ancestors who were born into a lifetime of bondage and servitude, forbidden from learning how to read and write, each discovery made is akin to finding a sacred precious object. Each discovery for an enslaved ancestor is a hard fought for success. Something as basic as discovering even a first name for an enslaved ancestor is cause for celebration. This dynamic makes African American genealogy something unique. A people stripped of history, customs, traditions, family and ancestry have precious few clues to find their ancestors. This was by design. American slavery was designed and developed with this in mind to better control a people who chaffed at the slavery system. It also laid the foundations for the American expression of white supremacy.
Lewis Matthews was illiterate, born in a time when it was illegal for slaves to learn how to read and write. He was incapable of leaving any words to his descendants. Nor were his children capable of leaving a written account. All of his known 22 children were illiterate. What I have gleaned of his life has largely come from vital records and slave records. He was human property. He was first owned by his father, and then by his half-sister, Susannah Pope Matthews. Like a chair, a horse, a parcel of land, or a table; he had a dollar value. US$ 450 in 1831 ($US 12,500.00 in 2016 currency) and US$ 500 in 1847 (US$ 14,705.88 in 2016 currency). Where there is property, there are accounts.
There are no words that can describe first seeing a Dollar value placed against an ancestor’s name on a Deed of Sale. No matter how prepared I was to see such a thing, it nevertheless broke my heart. It was a visceral and raw experience. One I will never forget.
I cannot visit, much less share, Lewis’s history without touching upon the history of the place where he was enslaved. The history of Edgefield, South Carolina.
An overview of Edgefield’s history, including ITS founding families
Prior to its formation in 1785, Edgefield County was a part of Ninety-Six District.
Ninety-Six was divided into new counties, afterwards called districts, which included: Edgefield, Abbeville, Newberry, Laurens, Union, and Spartanburg. Augusta, now in Georgia, also formed part of this county.
Old Ninety-Six, as it’s now called, was an active and critical trading post since the 1690s. The trade was mainly in furs. Prior to the arrival of European settlers and African-descended slaves, these lands were part of the dominion of the Cherokee Nation and the Creek. It was, and remains, an isolated, rural, and wild part of South Carolina.
Families such as Abney, Brooks, Cloud, Park, Sim(p)kins, and Stuart/Stewart, all slave owning families, were among the earliest settlers. DNA tests taken by the authors reveal a genetic connection to these families. A latter wave of 18th Century arrivals from Virginia to Edgefield would include additional slave owning families such as Adams, Brunson, Dorn, Harlan/Harling, Ma(t)thews/Mathis, Ouzts, Peterson, Settles, Timmerman, Thurman, Utterback, Yeldell and White – all of whom are the authors’ ancestors. The link between their African American descendants and their white descendants has been confirmed through DNA.
A shattered family tree through 300 years of Matthews family enslavement
Traditional genealogy enabled me to glimpse key moments in Lewis Matthews’ history.
Researching post-Emancipation marriage and death certificates identified thirteen children born to Lewis and the woman he would come to marry once freed, Martha Bottom, also of Blocker, Edgefield, South Carolina. It is worth remembering that prior to Emancipation, the births, deaths and marriages of slaves were rarely recorded. This is one of the most fundamental voids in African American genealogical research.
An additional death record produced another child, a daughter, born to Lewis and a woman only identified as Janie.
Social Security Application records and death records produced a further eight children born to Lewis during the period of his enslavement. The mother, or mothers, of these children were cited as ‘not known’ by the respective informants. DNA testing through AncestryDNA, along with DNA matching through Gedmatch, strongly suggests he fathered at least a further nine children prior to the end of the Civil War. All of his known and suspected children resided throughout the area formerly known as Ninety-Six.
Numerous conversations with African American Matthews-descended family members in the Old Ninety-Six area boiled down to one hypothesis when it came to the sheer number of children Lewis sired. He was used by his owner-father and owner-half-sister as a breeding stud. In short, he sired a steady stream of slave children for the benefit of their slave owners either to increase that owner’s workforce or as the human equivalent of a cash crop. A young, healthy, handsome young man with a light complexion, and seemingly potent when it came to impregnating women, Lewis had the perfect attributes to produce a steady stream of children with a fair complexion and robust health – attributes which would have made these children valuable property with a significant dollar value.
While Lewis had what we, in this day and age, would class as a paternal relationship with the children he had with Martha Bottom, he had no involvement with the children he fathered with other enslaved women. Those other children were either formally or informally adopted by the men those other women married when they were freed at the close of the Civil War. To date, until they heard from me, the descendants of those unions had no idea of their Matthews origins. The reason for this is telling. This second group of children took the names of their step fathers, bar two who took the name Mathes, a seemingly deliberate corruption of the original Matthews/Mathis name.
A broken family tree
The arrows in the image above mark entries for my 3x great grandfather, Lewis Matthews. The peculiarities of how male slaves were classed as an adult or ‘boy’ varied widely. Although both entries are for my 3x great grandfather. The asterisks mark confirmed members of Lewis’s enslaved African American family. Sampson, Primus and Matthew were Lewis’s brothers. The stars in the image above note how Primus and Sampson were deeded to other white Matthews family members, who were also their relations. DNA testing will confirm how many others from the same image will prove to be members of Lewis’s immediate and extended family. Click for larger image
As you read Drury Cook Matthews’s Last Will and Testament below, remember that this is my 4x great grandfather discussing the disposal of his property, which included his son, my 3x great grandfather, Lewis Matthews. I include the disposal of his other enslaved sons, Lewis’s brothers, who were my great uncles. Many of the ‘negroes’ cited in this Will were members of Lewis’s immediate family. All of the whites who inherited these black human beings were also their blood relations. American slavery was indeed a singularly peculiar institution.
Please click each image below for the larger image version.
My prevailing question is a fairly simple one. If Drury Matthews didn’t overtly recognize his own bi-racial flesh and blood as a human being, as a man, what impact did that have on Lewis’s sense of self and his sense of worth as a human being? What did this teach him about the duties of a father for his children? For certainly some of the other slaves referenced in this Will were Lewis’s siblings and equally children of Drury Cook Matthews. And how would this dynamic play out and echo down the generations on the African American side of the Matthews/Mathis family?
That Lewis was a loving and dutiful father to the children he raised with Martha Bottom is not in doubt. There are a handful of family stories to testify to this. What of his other thirteen known children? Did their step-fathers make up for Lewis’s absence? And how did Lewis reconcile himself with their existence? My hypothesis is that he learned a fundamental lesson from his father, Drury. Perhaps he compartmentalized his life in a manner many men can relate to. There were his children by Martha who he had a duty of care to provide for. Just like his father-owner did with his white children. And then there were those he merely sired for other’s benefit – much like Drury’s actions towards his mulatto children borne by enslaved women: they were not his concern and, as such, were of no concern.
Magnify the ramifications of this dynamic by working back through time. The story, the legacy, and the history between my mulatto Matthews ancestors and their white owners-family members stretches back in time to my 9th great grandfather, Anthony Matthews (1611-1682), a slave owning immigrant from Kent, England who settled in Isle of Wight, Virginia. Anthony was the founding father, the scion, of a large slave owning family who passed slaves and enslaved family members down its various lines into the Carolinas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas.
240 years of one family splitting its slave family apart generation after generation after generation; to the extent that their African American family had no notion of who they were as a people, they had no knowledge of their history, no knowledge of their kin or their kin’s whereabouts. It was the annihilation of their family. My family. It was a form of brutal ethnic cleansing at its most fundamental level.
Only now, through advances in DNA testing, can we, their descendants, begin the task of finding the broken branches from a slavery shattered family tree. Finding these lost branches is the easy part. Determining their rightful and correct place in the family tree is a painstaking process with no guarantee of success. It is a painstaking process. Each familial line has varying degrees of knowledge about their immediate ancestral line. Some can trace their ancestry back only 4 generations while others have traced their line of descent through 5 or more generations. Progress has largely been steered by the tireless efforts of a dozen or so dedicated family genealogists who have made it their life’s work to reunite a family dispersed through, and torn apart by, slavery. Their efforts require a combination of traditional genealogy alongside genetic genealogy and DNA triangulation. The task is herculean.
That is the legacy of slavery. This is the reason why the argument around reparations is a valid one.
In terms of non-Native American peoples who arrived in America, no other people in the history of the continental United States has ever experienced anything remotely like this. Not in scale. Not in duration.
Implications and reparations
Nienstedt makes the argument that “The State itself, then, as a natural extension of the family, mirrors this critical institution”. If the State was the cause of the destruction of enslaved African American families during the slavery epoch, does it not have a duty, a duty of care, to redress the wrongs done to enslaved families through restitution?
If, in Nienstedt’s argument, the progress and welfare of society, or its breakdown, can be traced to the strengths and unity, or the lack of it, in the family – should we not argue that the State has a moral imperative to recompense African Americans for the lack of progress; the lack of physical, mental and spiritual welfare; and the lack of unity wrought upon the descendants of slaves?
Reparations has the capacity to not only acknowledge the impact that slavery has had on the African American descendants of slavery, it can inform how best the State can serve those that slavery harmed. It addresses the legacies of slavery in the aftermath of slavery cemented in the Jim Crow Era, and the forms of socio-economic subjugation used against African Americans which followed the Jim Crow Era up to, and including, the present day. This latter point forms the central part of Ms William’s argument.
The civil unrest that smolders in modern America doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Its roots lay in slavery. Its roots lay in Andrew Johnson’s refusal to provide reparations when the America of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was ready to provide it.
Any conversation on the subject of reparations requires a national conversation. However, by the very nature of the subject, it must be directed and led by those most affected by slavery – African Americans. For me, reparations would take a multitude of forms:
Financial: A national, minority-owned and managed, banking system with branches in urban areas as well as rural areas with large minority populations. Such a banking network would supply micro loans to support entrepreneurship and innovation, land ownership, and subsidized home ownership (e.g. housing co-ownership); and
Education: A national history curriculum would include truthful and accurate teaching about slavery as well as its impact – tracing the effects of the slavery to the presents day. Recent news commentary shows a complete ignorance about America and its history of slavery, as well as its’ aftermath that resonates to the present day[ix]; and
Land theft compensation: Where land was stolen from African Americans by coercion, threats of violence or actual violence (as was the case in Edgefield[x][xi] in the 1920s, of which my own Matthews family was a victim) – there should be financial restitution in line with established precedents with Native American tribes;
Remembrance: A day with an official moment of silence in remembrance of the victims of slavery, and its legacy.
Martha Brooks by Donya Williams
The topic of this paper is to give our point of view on why African Americans should receive reparations from slavery. As an African American myself, of course my first initial thought is yes I should receive reparations for what my ancestors endured. I should because it is the only right thing to do. That is the short answer for one who is not fully educated on the topic of slavery.
For example, history didn’t teach me that those who were enslaved had the option to 1) keep the surnames of those that enslaved them after Emancipation; or 2) simply choose another surname if they wanted to. In fact, the only thing that history taught me was that whites enslaved blacks and that it was bad. It wasn’t until I started to research my family that I understood the magnitude of this question which, in turn, allowed me to give a more informed answer.
Martha Brooks was born into slavery in or about 1834 in South Carolina. The 1880 census says her parents were born in Virginia, however, who they were and where they originated from remains unknown. Before I started my research, my uncle researched the family in the 1950s. All that I know of his research is by word of mouth. His research found that we were from Haiti and that we were direct descendants of Alexandre Dumas. I have yet to prove his theories. This prompted me to look at other options for researching and DNA testing was at the top of my list. When I decided to do DNA testing I did so because I was stalled at where I was with regular researching and I felt DNA testing would give me more. I already knew other researchers who had tested and were getting results. Because my mother was the baby of 14 children, and her parents were born in the late 1890s, she was just one generation removed from slavery. This made her a prime person to test even though I wouldn’t be able to get much DNA pertaining to her father.
That is where Autosomal DNA testing stepped in. Autosomal DNA is a term used in genetic genealogy to describe DNA which is inherited from the autosomal chromosomes. An autosome is any of the numbered chromosomes, as opposed to the sex chromosomes. Humans have 22 pairs of autosomes and one pair of sex chromosomes (the X chromosome and the Y chromosome). Autosomes are numbered roughly in relation to their sizes. That is, Chromosome 1 has approximately 2,800 genes, while chromosome 22 has approximately 750 genes.[xii] This meant that taking this test for my mom would get info from her mother and father. DNA taken from my mother has shown that in short she is 86.6% Sub-Saharan African, 11.9% European, .6% East Asian & Native American, .3% Middle Eastern & North African, .1% South Asian and .5% Unassigned. The picture below gives a bigger breakdown:
I uploaded my mother’s raw data to Gedmatch, a company that allows you to compare your DNA with other people who have tested with other companies such as AncestryDNA.com and FTDNA.com, and found there were even larger breakdowns. Those breakdowns connected her to the Mediterranean, North-AmerIndian and several other demographics (see picture below):
This DNA analysis result from Gedmatch is just one of many different DNA analysis tools that can be used to learn one’s DNA breakdown. These analytical tools enable a person to understand how he or she is connected to several different demographics. Testing my mother felt like I had just tested Eve herself. My mother’s DNA was extremely revealing. She was genetically connected to every well-known name in the Edgefield area.
Martha was enslaved by one of the first families of Edgefield, South Carolina. The Brooks family. Like those that take DNA test to prove paternity, or find birth parents, DNA for genealogical research does the same thing. My mother’s results proved she was related to the Brooks family. This family was not just active in the settling of Edgefield; they were also active in the settling of America. Zachariah, Whitfield, and Preston Brooks (respectively Grandfather, Son, and Grandson) were involved in at least two American wars prior to the Civil War.
The American Revolutionary War and the Mexican War both seemed to have family members of the Brooks involved. Zachariah was enlisted in Newberry District, S.C. shortly after the evacuation of Cambridge by Gen. Greene, and served six months as a private in Capt. John Wallace’s Company of S.C. Troops. He fought in several skirmishes against the British. He served in 1781 and 1782 in Capt. Joseph Towles, company, Col. Samuel Hammond’s S.C. regiment, was in a skirmish on the Edisto River, and was stationed about six weeks on the frontier guarding the incursions of the Indians. He was also enlisted as one of a corps called the Life Guard of Pickens, serving a six month’s term of service. He was afterwards appointed Col. of State Calvary, and was always known as Col. Brooks[xiii]. Whitfield and Preston were both lawyers, and involved in both state as well as national politics. Preston fought in the Mexican War with his brother Whitfield, Jr.
Both men were a part of the Palmetto Regiment of the South Carolina Volunteers where Preston served as Captain. Whitfield Brooks, Sr. carried the title of Colonel however, I don’t see what service branch he fought with or what war he fought in. My research shows that he may have been mistaken as his son. However, Both Whitfield and Preston were planters and strong supporters of slavery. Preston Brooks was probably the most outspoken of the three – he is certainly the most well-known – when it came to slavery. It is he who committed the horrendous crime against the abolitionist Charles Sumner; what historians know as ‘the caning’. Simply put, Senator Brooks walked up to Mr. Sumner, who was sitting at his desk on the senate floor, and said “You’ve libeled my state and slandered my white-haired old relative, Senator Butler, and I’ve come to punish you for it.[xiv] This to Mr. Preston was a legitimate reason to beat a man so badly that it took three years for Senator Sumner to return to some semblance of physical normalcy.
Preston believed, supported, and encouraged the succession of South Carolina. On 1 November 1856, the Meeting of the Secessionists of South Carolina at Ninety-Six held an event to honor Mr. Brooks for what he did to Mr. Sumner. The south supported his choice to brutally beat Mr. Sumner. This event was not the only event held in his honor. Directly after the beating, Mr. Brooks resigned his position from the Senate. In response to this, his fellow countrymen voted him back into his seat and sent him over 300 canes to show their support. This particular event presented the Honorable Preston S. Brooks with goblets of silver and gold, and replicas of the same cane he used to beat Mr. Charles Sumner. As a part of his acceptance speech he wrote the following:
I tell you, fellow citizens, from the bottom of my heart, that the only mode, which I think available for meeting it is just to tear the Constitution of the United States, trample it under foot, and form a southern confederacy, every state of which will be a slaveholding State. I believe it, as I stand in the face of my maker—I believe it on my responsibility you as your honored representative that the only available means of making that hope effective is to cut asunder the bonds that tie us together, and take our separate positions in the family of nations. These are my opinions. They have always been my opinions. I have been a disunionist from the time I could think.[xv]
Martha was sold for $1,205 dollars in 1857 when Preston died. This information was found in the Edgefield Archives as well as in the book Slave Records of Edgefield County by Gloria Lucas.[xvi] I found a chart explaining the worth of a slave during 1857, the same year Martha was sold to Lemuel Brooks. This chart compared the cost of a slave in 1857 to what a slave would cost if slavery still existed in 1998:[xvii]
Class
Value in Dollars, 1857
Value in Dollars, 1998
Number 1 men
1250-1450
20,800-24,100
Fair/Ordinary Men
1000-1150
16,700-19,200
Best Boys (Age 15-18)
1100-1200
18,300-20,000
Best Boys (Age 10-14)
500-575
8,300-17,900
Number 1 Women
1050-1225
17,500-20,400
Fair/Ordinary Women
1050-1225
14,200-17,100
Best Girls
500-1000
8,300-16,700
Families
“Sell in their usual proportions”
Being sold for that amount, and finding the chart above, gave proof that Martha was in fact considered a prime breeding woman. Martha went through every atrocity that was heard of when it came to slavery for black women.
miscegenation – The interbreeding of individuals considered to be of different racial backgrounds;
fancy trade – Female slaves called “fancy maids” were sold at auction into concubinage or prostitution, which was termed the “fancy trade”; and
slave breeding – Slave breeding in the United States was a practice of slave ownership that aimed to encourage the reproduction of slaves in order to increase a slaveholder’s property and wealth.[xviii]
With my mother’s DNA showing that she was related to the Brooks family, I began to get a better understanding of things. I am politically knowledgeable and acutely aware of the things that are still happening to African Americans today. In some moments I can, and have, recited speeches similar to friends and family similar to the one you read above by Mr. Brooks himself. By reading and understanding his stance when it came to slavery, as well as finding the chart above, it was clear to me who I was. My mindset, my attitude and even how I can sometimes be hot-headed. It was like a light bulb was turned on and who I really am became clear to me. I was the product of my family; all of my family white and black and its surroundings. I am an American to the fullest extent of that word.
Defending the Case of Reparations
Genealogy has become very popular and the case of reparation is becoming more and more prevalent. Due to the use of DNA being added to genealogical research, it is becoming known that 151 years later, the descendants of slaves are still looking for their families.
I am a direct descendant of Martha Brooks. This topic raises the question of do I deserve reparations for everything that my 2nd great-grandmother, and her parents before her, went through? Answering honestly, I will say that reparations doesn’t entirely address the history of slavery and its aftermath in the United States.
I believe that I should have reparations on top of the acknowledgment of slavery. I believe that just like those who survived the Holocaust received monetary payments, and the recognition of an act that didn’t even happen on American soil, I should receive the same thing. European Jewry endured the horrific and the unimaginable during a 12-year period. Enslaved Africans, and their enslaved descendants, endured the horrific and the unimaginable for approximately 20 generations; nearly 400 years. In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act to compensate more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. The legislation offered a formal apology and paid out $20,000 in compensation to each surviving victim. The law won congressional approval only after a decade-long campaign by the Japanese-American community.[xix]
David Horowitz makes the claim that those asked to pay reparations have no liability because they didn’t do the enslaving, that their ancestors did. When truth be told, there were several different genocidal crimes committed against African Americans that could be attributed to the suppression of African Americans after slavery:
The bombing and burning of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma 1921;
The burning and lynching of Rosewood, FL 1923;
Moore’s Ford Bridge Massacre 1947;
Church burnings that took place from 1954-2015;
Illegal and unconstitutional arrests of Blacks during the Civil Rights movement;
Jim Crow laws enacted at the state and local levels and ignored at the federal level;
The implications of the CIA linked crack epidemic in Black communities; and
Disenfranchised Hurricane Katrina victims living below the poverty line.
I cite these examples to address an argument often used against the American government making reparations to the descendants of enslaved Africans: the people who committed the crimes against the enslaved, and those who immediately survived the crime of slavery, are no longer alive, therefore, money being paid out is unnecessary. Boiled down, it is a statute of limitations argument. At its heart lays the profound denial that the cumulative psychological trauma of slavery had an end date. That the trauma that affected those who were enslaved wasn’t passed down the generations. An inheritance of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. [xx]
A disorder further heightened during the Jim Crow Era and the trauma endured during the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. It is also said that federally funded programs such as affirmative action, the welfare program, and similar initiatives were ways that reparations have been paid.
To state that the federally funded programs are the way reparations have been paid is a slap in the face. Why? Because not all African Americans have accessed, or utilized, the welfare program. It is a proven fact that more Caucasian Americans have utilized this program than African Americans. According to Statistics Brain, 38.8% of welfare recipients are white, while 39.8% of recipients are black. The remaining 21.4% is a combination of Hispanics, Asians and other nationalities. But when you look at the percentage of those receiving food stamps, White Americans receive a whopping 40.2% while African Americans are 25.7% the remaining makes up the other nationalities.
The bottom line is, however, the fact that a promise was made 151 years ago to give over 400,000 acres of land stretching from South Carolina to Florida to the freed slaves. This was a promise retracted by the then President of the United States, Andrew Johnson. Honoring this promise should make America at least want to keep its word. National honor should be reason enough.
End Notes
[i] Thomas Aquinas, In Libros Ethicorum Aristotelis Expositio, Lib. I, lect. 1. “Man is by nature a social animal, since he stands in need of many vital things which he cannot come by through his own unaided effort (Avicenna). Hence he is naturally part of a group by which assistance is given him that he may live well. He needs this assistance with a view to life as well as to the good life.”
[v] Edward E. Baptist. “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism,” Basic Books, New York. 2014.
[vi] Octavia Victoria Rogers. “The house of bondage, or, Charlotte Brooks and other slaves, original and life like, as they appeared in their old plantation and city slave life: together with pen-pictures of the peculiar institution, with sights and insights into their new relations as freedmen, freemen, and citizens,” Hunt & Eaton, New York. 1890. Last accessed 17 June 2016 via http://digital.cincinnatilibrary.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16998coll17/id/9976.
[x] J. D. Allen-Taylor. “Tracking the ghosts of Edgefield County,” South Carolina Progressive Network. 1996. Last accessed 21 June 2016 via
. http://www.scpronet.com/point/9606/p10.html.
[xi] Todd Lewan, Dolores Barclay and Allen G. Breed. “Land ownership made blacks targets of violence and murder,” Authentic Voice. 2001. Last accessed 21 June 2016 via
[xvi] Gloria R. Lucas. “Slave Records of Edgefield County, South Carolina. Edgefield County Historical Society, Edgefield County, South Carolina. 2010, p. 55-56.
A screen grab of the interactive AfricaMap. click for larger image
Harvard University has created an interactive map which illustrates the ethnic diversity within the African continent. The map is based on data from a 2001 book edited by anthropologist Marc Leo Felix.
I have spent hours playing around with this map. The amount of data it contains is simply staggering.
This map highlights points that I have made over the years: understanding the dispersal of human DNA within Africa is complicated.
Each color on the map roughly corresponds to an ethnic group that constitutes the majority within a region, based on how people self-identify. Ethnicity is notoriously difficult to measure and demarcate — everyone sees their own ethnic identity a little differently . The results roughly correspond to a 1959 ethnography by anthropologist George Murdock, as well as a 2002 Harvard Institute study on ethnic diversity.
For me, one key issue remains. The migration and dispersal of ancient humans within Africa is nowhere near as well understood or studied as the dispersal of ancient humans from Africa around the globe. Science knows more about how humans migrated from the eastern Horn of Africa to Ireland than it does about how humans migrated from East Africa to Africa’s western coast.
One of indications of this is inherent within the interactive map itself. The different African ethnicities are defined by language groups (i.e. Bantu speaking, Chadic speaking, Cushtic speaking, etc). It’s like saying the Normans of France, the Cornish, the Irish and the Scots are the same ethnic group because they are historically Celtic speaking people of northwestern Europe. Or that all Arabic speaking peoples are the same because they share the same language.
However, this map project is an impressive start. If, at the very least, you come away with a sense of just how diverse the different peoples of Africa are, thee map has succeeded in its main aim. It can also give the growing number of African Americans taking DNA tests insights into the regions of Africa they are genetically connected to.
You can read more about this project, and access the interactive map, via the following article: Fisher, Max, 2015. A fascinating color-coded map of Africa’s diversity, Vox. http://www.vox.com/2015/11/10/9698574/africa-diversity-map
One of the national archives I would love to delve into online belongs to the NAACP. From a family historian and genealogist’s point of view, this archive ranks alongside the Freedman’s Records Archive in terms of significance for African Americans. Its contents, collected over its hundred-plus years of existence, is simply priceless.
It’s an archive I’ve looked for on both Ancestry.com and FamilySearch. The archive isn’t available on either service. This, I have to admit, really surprized me. So I began to wonder if the NAACP had digitized its archive at all. Naturally, I took to Google to find out. And lo and behold, the answer was, well, ‘kind of’…and ‘no’.
The short version of the story is that the NAACP teamed up with ProQuest in 2011 to digitize over 2 million documents (no mention was made of the images in its archive). So I really got excited. 2 million documents – just think about all those names, historical context, information any African American family historian would love to peruse online! I know that ProQuest is a commercial venture targeted at the research community. The press release did hold out one glimmer of hope for public access to the archive; the Library of Congress. Could I find what I was looking for there?
Now part of this archive is available in the Library of Congress, saved on microfilm. I hoped that the Library of Congress might have digitized a substantial part of the collection. So I went to surf over to the Library of Congress’s site full of expectation.
Why all this interest in the NAACP’s archive in the first place? Well, I have a few distant relations from the tangent branches of the Sheffey and Roane families – Carpenters, Hills, Fields, Bagbys and Meltons – who were quite active in the NAACP in its early years. I wanted to find out about their involvement. I wanted to see how they had fought the oppression which influenced their day-to-day lives and those of their respective communities. I wanted a more personal and informative glimpse into their lives. And, if possible, pictures.
A quick Google search on the term “NAACP archives Library of Congress” gave me this link:http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/naacp/It’s a special sub-site on the Library of Congress website celebrating the Centenary of the NAACP. It’s a start – that’s what I told myself. But I have to admit a profound sense of disappointment at the lack of materials available. What’s there is historically significant, and kind of what you’d expect to find; information about the NAACP’s founders, the key players of its 100 years’ existence, and key moments in time in the organization’s history. And that’s about it. But then something tugged at the back of my mind about that ProQuest press release. The proverbial light came on and I had one of those ‘oh no’ moments.
I went back to the press release – the thing that had initially got me so excited in the first place – and re-read it. And two things hit me at once. The first was the realization that the archive had indeed been digitized and was available through ProQuest itself. The second was a key sentence in the press release: “This archive will provide a valuable service to historians and activists alike.”
And therein lies the essential problem for me. Yes, this is an archive of historical importance. But it is so much more than that. Why such a limited view? Why the assumption that only a limited audience would be interested in it? I wish the NAACP had been advised better before striking this deal.
This archive is a treasure trove for family historians, genealogists, teachers, sociologists, communities, African American history academics and students, political science academics and students – and more. For every famous name that features in the archive, there are countless more who worked at the grass route level. I know my ancestors did. These documents evidence our ancestors’ contributions to the struggles for equality. That fact alone raises this collection above being merely one of interest to historians and activists. Under the current arrangement with ProQuest, the likelihood is that it’s very unlikely I can ever access the documents that reference my ancestors because I don’t have the academic ‘passport’ to access ProQuest’s online resources. The general public won’t be able to access it. That’s wrong.
I can’t share the NAACP-related stories about my ancestors for the simple reason that I can’t access the documents that would provide that vital information necessary to tell those stories. My feeling is that the more people who can access this archive and find out about their ancestors contributions to the NAACP, and write about them or share them in other ways – translates into a ‘win’ for the NAACP. Every mention underlines its importance. It’s a shame that this simply isn’t possible under the current arrangements for its digital archives. It is a genuine missed opportunity.
This archive also has an educational value. It would have formed a perfect basis for creating online courses and/or modules about the African American struggles for equality from the foundation of the NAACP to the present day. These would be courses and modules hosted online and geared to primary, secondary, university and post-graduate study. Again, another lost opportunity.
I’m a firm believer that the owners and curators of archives need to stop thinking of archives with such incredibly limited views and solely within a historical context – with an assumption that only academic historians will be interested or able to appreciate the value of the information. It’s time for archives to be thought of in a much wider social context.It’s time to think about re-envisioning access to socially important document and image collections and to think of the widest possible audiences for them.
My main hope, at the moment, is that the NAACP’s deal with ProQuest isn’t exclusive. And that either ProQuest or the NAACP can make these records available, as a specialist collection, to the leading online family history websites. In addition to this, that a deal could be struck with the Library of Congress to develop online learning resources in the form of eLearning courses or modules.
I have a feeling that approaches like the ones I’ve outlined above not only ensure the sustainability of archives, through supporting a practice of widening public access to archives…but can bring in a rich mix of revenue from a myriad of sources.
A quick Google search on the term “NAACP archives Library of Congress” gave me this link: