Reparative Genealogy - My "Why"

 

Reparations4Slavery, an organization led by Lotte Lieb Dula and Briayna Cuffie, defines reparitive genealogy as follows:  “the act of researching our heritage, acknowledging our connection so slavery, and daylighting the history of those our ancestors enslaved” . Their organization advocates for acknowledgement by making slavery-era records available online to those who descend from slaves.

When I first started to climb my family tree back in the early 1990’s, I knew very little about my dad’s line except that my paternal grandfather’s family were Irish immigrants, and my maternal grandmother was from the Deep South. My grandparents had met in the days just prior to World War I, when my grandfather, an Indiana boy, was training at Camp Shelby near Biloxi, Mississippi prior to shipping out to France.  They married after the war and spent several years living near my grandmother’s family in Wiggins, Mississippi. My dad lived there as a very young boy.

 

I grew up hearing his vague stories of a fabled plantation in Mississippi that was lost during the Civil War, although my dad, born nearly 60 years after the end of that war, never knew which branch of the family supposedly owned it.  As a young boy, he was surrounded by Southern aunts and uncles who honored their fallen heroes, grieved over the loss of homes and property, raged over perceived injustices and lost fortunes and never much discussed the institution of slavery that had allowed their grandparents to survive, if not thrive, in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Their grandparents were good people who did bad things that didn’t seem bad to them, since everyone they knew, everywhere they went, were doing the same things. Then the war came and they lost; the struggle for survival was fierce and they were of no mind set to admit to any wrongdoing.

 

I had suspected for some time that several of my ancestors were enslavers. When you’re white and have deep roots in this country, particularly Southern roots, it’s an uncomfortable truth that your people likely owned slaves, especially if they were large landowners. But I had somehow convinced myself that a) only an occasional ancestor here and there actually owned slaves, and they didn’t own very many; b) these ancestors were good, kind people who treated their slaves well; and c) they really only owned slaves because it was the only way to run a big farm back then. It’s called rationalizing and I got pretty good at it.

 

But suspecting something is quite different from coming face to face with hard evidence; as my genealogy skills increased and my family tree grew, I began to understand the depth of my family’s involvement in slavery, and I could no longer deny the truths. I actually had to set aside much of my research for a year or so while I came to terms with my own history.

 

To date, I have found proof of 138 enslavers in my family; 11 of these are my direct ancestors, and I suspect that many more will be found. Several of them owned multiple large plantations and enslaved many people; one or two were slave traders or even “breeders”. This is just on my father’s side of the family, in the Southern states; but I know that my mother’s side, who came to this country in the early 1600’s and settled in New England, also had a few enslavers amongst the branches – including esteemed members of the Coffin family.

 

Besides the common and understandable emotions of guilt, anger and shame that come when you discover enslavers among your ancestors, there is an intense sadness for all that has been lost. As genealogists, we love the thrill of tracking down an elusive great-grandparent or fascinating uncle, and each tidbit of information is another family story to add to our own; but when the trail goes cold and nothing can be found it leaves a hole in our story where branches have been pruned out. My most frustrating “brick wall” is my great-grandmother Mary Bridget Burke, who apparently sprung to life under a cabbage leaf in Alton, Illinois in 1862 with no clear indication of who her parents were other than “Burke, born in Ireland”.

 

I cannot imagine the sadness felt by those who descend from enslaved ancestors when their stories vanish beyond the nearly impenetrable wall of the 1870 census, the first that enumerated Black families. Slave births, deaths and marriages were not officially recorded before the end of the Civil War, and most slaves were only enumerated on the 1850 and 1860 census with no personally identifying information other than age, gender and name of their owner - no names or places of birth, or spouses or children. How on earth do you discover your roots when all evidence of them has been so well hidden?

 

The answer is – you turn to the enslavers’ descendants. Me. You turn to me.  My families were the property owners, the tax payers, the will writers and administrators. Probate files are full of receipts, inventories, sales records. There are court records (in areas where court houses were not burned), family letters, Bibles, tax records. It is hard work to piece together this information, but descendants of enslavers have the access to records that may unlock information for you – names, ages, births, inheritances, etc. Many of us have the research skills, experience and knowledge needed to help, and an intense desire and obligation to do so.

 

There are many rights to be wronged, many aspects of reparations that need to be addressed. I can’t begin to address them all, but my skill set may help to rebuild the erased history of the enslaved ancestors my family were responsible for. I am working to find and document as many of these enslaved families as possible and share the found information wherever possible to get it into the hands of the descendants who deserve it. In future posts, I will highlight some options for making this information available.