Treasure Chest Thursday: Six Degrees of Slave Owner Separation

It’s nice to be back from a great vacation where I unplugged from my computer and soaked up the surf and sun.

Even though I wasn’t blogging or researching, genealogy was never too far from me.  As we made our way down to Hilton Head, South Carolina,  we passed a town named Burtonville (Burton is my great, great-grandmother’s surname) and saw a sign for Nash County, NC where many of my ancestor’s slave owners were from.  If there is one thing I’ve learned on this journey, it’s that the genealogy world is small, and all relative.  And my ancestors’ world was just as small if not smaller and it seems their owners really were related.

A few months back when I realized that one of the women who owned my great, great-grandmother, Tempy was Judith Boddie, I started searching for information about the prominent North Carolina Boddie family and found a Google book with extensive information about their lineage.   The book, Lineage and Tradition of the Herring, Conyers, Hendrick, Boddie, Perry, Crudup, Denson and Hilliard Families shows the interconnection of all these families through marriage.  When I found it,  I didn’t know that another family listed in this book also owned my ancestors.  While Tempy was owned by the Boddies, her sisters, Polly and Liberia were owned by Dr. Robert Hilliard. Hilliard settled in Louisiana but was originally from Nash, NC.  The Google book shows generations of intermarriage between the Boddies and Hilliards.  There is even one family member named Tempe Boddie Hilliard!  (Tempe was a popular name among both families).

Six degrees of separation?  I think a lot less.

Can you connect yourself to the president through six people or less?  A woman at my gym works for him.  Your turn.

Treasure Chest Thursday: Family and National Treasures

My daughters and me in front of the National Archives, Washington, DC

It’s spring break for us so we decided to take a road trip to Washington, D.C. where I took my little treasures to see a national treasure, the National Archives.  We all were in awe of the Declaration of Independence, strained to see the faded writing on the Bill of Rights and quietly took in the Emancipation Proclamation.  No kids are allowed in the research center so thank goodness my husband sat with the girls while I printed out a few things at the archives’ library. (You can research just about anything there from your ancestor’s Civil War records to census documents). It’s the third time we’ve been to DC as a family but our country’s capital is so rife with history, it would take a week at least to visit all of its treasures.  We managed to fit in a trip to the National Aquarium as well in our two-day tour. I can’t wait for the next road trip. Whether we’re passing the driving time playing the family game where we try to stump each other with questions about our ancestors or exploring all the many facets of our nation’s history while walking around DC, we learn something new each time we visit.

The National Archives research entrance.

“Wench” – Stranger than fiction truth about slavery

Old sketch of Mount Clemens, Michigan where Temple and her daughter, Josephine visited in 1905

Just as I’m finishing up the 700-plus paged tome, The Hemingses of Monticello (only 200  more pages to go!), I’ve found another ancestor-related book to add to my research list.  This one is a début novel, Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez about masters on vacation with their slave mistresses at a resort in free state Ohio.

In an interview on NPR today, Perkins-Valdez said she got the idea for her novel after reading about Tawawa, a real resort in Ohio that was a popular place for masters to relax with their mistress slaves.  WEB DuBois mentioned Tawawa in passing in a biography, she said.

I was as intrigued listening to her describe happening upon this hidden piece of history as I was when I stumbled on to the secret of my great great-grandfather, Col. W.R. Stuart and his slave mistress, my great great-grandmother, Temple Burton.

When the interviewer went  on to explain that Tawawa was near mineral water and people retreated to it for what they believed were its healing qualities, I almost stumbled across my own feet for real.  Temple and her daughter, my great-grandmother Josephine also traveled to a town known for  its mineral waters, Mount Clemens,  Michigan in 1905.  The premise of Perkins-Valdez’s historical novel made me wonder if Temple had ever visited Mount Clemens or anywhere else with her master, the father of her 7 children, before he died in the late 1890s.

Masters and their slave mistresses vacationing together?  A slave having 7 children with her master even after being freed and living with him and his wife for the rest of their lives?

The truth is stranger than fiction.  I’m looking forward to both in the novel, Wench.

I’ve now come across two books that seem closely related to my family’s history.   What books best describe your family, current or in generations past?

An Oral Tradition

My Grandma Louise told me her stories while we swam on Hilton Head Island

When I read the New York Times article last week about Michelle Obama’s ancestry, the fact that her family lore had suspected a white relative for years underscored the importance of gathering oral history.  For blacks, the paper trail often runs cold since many slave births and deaths weren’t documented.  Even my grandmother, born in 1910 never had a birth certificate.  This was the case for many poor  people (not just blacks) as well as those born in very rural areas around the turn of the century.

It’s easy for family history in general, but the history of African Americans in particular to die with our ancestors. That’s why I’m  so grateful for all the story tellers in my life like my grandfather Martin Ford, and my grandmothers, Lillie Mae Ford and Louise Coleman Walton.  When Martin and Lillie Mae were alive, they were generous with their stories of their lives in segregated Mississippi and Louisiana, and Louise at 93 continues to regale me with her tales of picking cotton and potatoes as a sharecropper, first in Oklahoma and then in California often with my mother, then just a baby in tow.

I’ve inherited my grandparents’ storytelling genes  and for the next two weeks, I have the privilege of spending uninterrupted time spinning tales at a beautiful hilltop artist’s colony in Amherst Virginia. While I’m here at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, I hope to work on a fictionalized version of my maternal grandparents’ adventures.  (No one would believe the true stories).  So, I’ll turn this story over to  my fourth cousin, Monique and let her tell you how we found each other in our parallel quests for our family’s history.