Follow Friday: Finding my Enslaved Third Great-Grandmother

Yesterday, I shared with you all that I’d found another generation of my family tree.  I now know that Eliza Burton was my third great-grandmother, a slave on a plantation in Attakapas, Louisiana and was owned by a Dr. Sterling.  Along with my great, great-grandmother, Tempy Burton, Eliza had three other children and two sisters. I know all of this because Eliza’s daughter, Tempy told me so in her own words.  in 1891, Tempy placed an ad in the Southwestern Christian Advocate looking for her family, separated by slavery.  So how did Tempy’s 120 year-old petition to find her family then find me, her great, great-granddaughter now?   The following e-mail from my new friend, Shannon (reproduced here with permission and edited for privacy) explains it all:

Basically, I’m fascinated by historic newspapers.  My husband does a great deal of historical work, and before I moved (to Louisiana) to marry him, I was a curator at a  museum in New Orleans.  So I subscribe to Ancestry, GenealogyBank, and – although this will surprise you as the place where I found Tempy’s advertisements – the New England Historic Genealogical Society, which has a fantastic run of 19th century newspapers (from all over the country, not just New England) available on its website.  One of the newspapers is the Southwestern Christian Advocate.  I came upon the Lost Friends column purely by accident, while searching for something else.  It is compelling, if harrowing, reading.  Sometimes if a story really grips me, I’ll do a Google search to see if any of the person’s descendants are looking for them.  Sometimes I’ll lurk on the Afrigeneas board to see if I can find someone who connects – I’m white but an ardent admirer of the work that Afrigeneas does – but until today I’ve never actually found anyone looking for the writer of the article.  So, this morning, I was just in the mood to read Lost Friends, and I picked one entirely at random, and it was Tempy’s, and it gripped me.  And there was your cousin’s old posting (on Afrigeneas) looking for information about her.  I think it must have been fate, pure and simple!

I joined the New England Historic Genealogical Society within 24 hours of getting Shannon’s email and like Shannon, I’m pretty hooked on their newspaper collection.  If you haven’t already, leave a message on AfriGeneas or any other genealogy board that might help you find your ancestors.  They want to find you as much as you want to find them.

What historic society have you joined and which of their resources do you most utilize?