As we in the United States celebrate Black History Month, I want to highlight my ardent search in my family tree to discover whether any of my ancestors had been slaveholders. My interest in this part of history was always in the back of my mind and became more so as my family tree grew.
Please understand I am aware that Black History Month is an opportunity to understand Black Histories going beyond racism and slavery to spotlight Black achievement. However, the genealogist in me got the best of me. This post is about my family tree and what I have learned from it. I felt compelled to write about it.
As a genealogist I adhere to the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS). Spoiler alert: Therefore, and unfortunately, I concluded that my ancestor had enslaved other human beings after my exhaustive research conforming to the GPS.
This post is about my journey that uncovered a horrific truth in my family, how it influenced my thinking, and eventually my thoughts as to how I possibly could contribute to the continuing awareness of the saga of slavery in America.
I want to note here that what white Americans treat as a historical curiosity --- something to investigate if we chose to --- is to Black America a cruel, unavoidable ghost that haunts this nation’s cities, schools, hospitals, and prisons. Think of these perspectives as you research.
I feel it is my belief and responsibility to research this atrocity and to possibly atone for it. Once read, you may sense and believe that I am a bleeding heart liberal or “woke.” But that is your prerogative to decide. I am merely writing about a truth that I uncovered in my family tree.
About six months ago I discovered on Ancestry.com that my 5th paternal grandfather owned two female slaves. When he died the two enslaved women were conveyed to his wife in his will dated 1771. His name was Ralph Smith. As I researched further and came upon the will of Huldah Buchannan Smith, his wife, and my 5th grandmother, probated in 1773 in Somerset County, Maryland on the eastern shore of Maryland, I unearthed more information. This truth was unsettling to say the least.
Huldah and Ralph Smith were both born in Boston, Massachusetts. Ralph in 1698 and Huldah in 1702. Somehow, I am not sure what the reason was that they had moved to the Pocomoke One Hundred in Maryland closer to and at the end of their lives.
In Maryland, the term "hundred" referred to a division of a county during the colonial period. Hundred is an old English term which may have originally indicated a hundred taxable units within royal estates. Hundreds were used in Maryland during the colonial period and for some years after to designate divisions within a county. They were established by county officials for taxation and other purposes. A “hundred” would be created when 100 people settled in a given area.
I have not yet discovered what brought Ralph and Huldah to the Pocomoke Hundred, named for the Native American tribe that lived there for many centuries. But it appears that Ralph and Huldah owned two female slaves named Bet and Jury when they resided there during the last third of the 18th century. I have no idea how they came into possession of two human beings as I found no records of them owning slaves while they resided in Massachusetts and later in New Jersey. I only know their names from reading Hannah’s will.
Upon Huldah’s death, the two were to be passed down to her daughter, Huldah Smith Brown, with the caveat that her husband, Solomon Brown, paid the younger Huldah’s sisters thirty pounds in equal sums of money for the enslaved woman named Bet. Jury, Bet's child, was conveyed to her son (John) Buchannan Smith, my 4th great-grandfather. Notice here that misogyny was also rampant in colonial America, but that is for another blog post.
I did exhaustive research attempting to discern what eventually happened to these women. I came up with nothing. Slave schedules were not compiled until the 1850s and these women lived and were enslaved in the mid to late 1700s This is a sad commentary on the value that this country placed on enslaved people in a number of diverse ways.
I have more research to pursue regarding the ultimate of Bet and Jury.
Here is some information that I found in my research about slavery in Maryland during the 1770s:
In 1770, the Eastern Shore of Maryland had small farms and few enslaved people. However, the Chesapeake Bay region as a whole had a large slave population.
Slaves in the Chesapeake Bay region
Between 1700 and 1770, the slave population grew from 13,000 to 250,000.
By 1775, Black people made up nearly one-third of the region's population.
Maryland and Virginia imported more slaves than any other mainland British colony in the 1700s.
Slavery on the Eastern Shore
The average enslaver on the Eastern Shore owned five to eight enslaved people.
The Eastern Shore became a major supplier of slaves after importation was banned in 1808.
To say the least, I was saddened and surprised that my ancestors participated in slavery as my ancestors of whom I write were from “the north” having been born in Boston, Massachusetts and lived a good portion of their lives there.
What I rediscovered as I researched slavery in Maryland and in the northern colonies was a sad story about how this country was built on the physicality of people who had been kidnapped from Africa, sold in the British Colonies and later in the states to the highest bidder, up and down the east and southern coast of America.
And, indeed, the northern colonies participated in the slave trade. Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island were particularly busy ports where slave ships moored in the colonies and later when the colonies became a country. In fact, Newport, Rhode Island was the largest slave trade port in North America for most of the 18th century. Today the Newport Middle Passage Project is working to build a public memorial to acknowledged Newport’s role in the slave trade. The beautiful, historic, and lovingly restored Newport, which I have visited many times, has a dark and cruel past.
While the people of the northern colonies owned fewer slaves than the southern colonies they did, in fact, benefit from slavery through businesses that involved the cotton and textile industry.
Indulge me as I lay out a bit of my history and why I thought slavery never touched my ancestors.
I was born in the early 1950s in northeastern Pennsylvania in a valley carved out by the Susquehanna River that had originally been populated for centuries by several Native American tribes. My ethnic and genetic background according to my DNA analysis is that of northwestern Europe, primarily England, Germany, and France, about as “white bread” as someone can be.
As I grew up in the 1950s in northeastern Pennsylvania I was fed the usual bullsh..t about slavery in America in school; a glossed-over, and romanticized version of the abominable institution. I was taught “negro spirituals” that were printed and illustrated in music books with images of happy dark-skinned children and their hard-working parents and grandparents. I read about the "whitewashed" version of slavery in history books. What a crock of sh..t!
I am also very ashamed to say that I never saw a Black person until I was five years old in Philadelphia when my family visited my paternal great-grandmother and great-grand uncle who lived there.
In addition, my beloved maternal grandfather, who loved me to the moon and back, was a racist! I had a toy that was a black baby doll (she was my very favorite, yet my grandfather taunted me with it!) I never understood the taunting and ignored him about this issue. Thankfully neither of my parents were racists to my knowledge.
My mother once told me about a cross-burning on Bunker Hill (a small mountain in Northeastern Pennsylvania) just a few miles from my childhood home that had occurred in the 1930s! I never understood what that meant until I became a teenager.
In the mid-to-late 1960s my ideas began to change when I became aware of the racial unrest in this country that was reported on the nightly news. And then, in 1969, I went to college. Questions about slavery began to populate in my brain as I learned more about this country in my civics and history classes. I had Black friends, some of whom seemed angry much of the time, and spoke out in classes causing me to question the Black historical experience in United States. It was uncomfortable for me. These questions and then some answers led to a range of emotions in me including shame, remorse, guilt, and anger.
Then in 1977 Alex Haley’s production of his historic television miniseries “Roots "was aired on TV. This was probably the first full-fledged story of Black America shown to an entire nation, first through the eyes of Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton as a youth, then John Amos as an adult), then his children and eventually his ancestor ‘Chicken George’ (Ben Vereen). There are varying opinions about this mini-series, but it had a consciousness-raising aspect for the African American population who very often could not do family tree research the way voluntary European immigrants’ descendants could. For me, as a white person it triggered my outrage about slavery in America.
As time passed, I moved into adulthood and became a wife and mother. Necessary life experiences filled my time. I was always aware of the societal injustice of slavery but had no voice to comment on it. I still resided in the isolated and sheltered Wyoming Valley of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
I knew that many of ancestors fought, and some died, in the American Civil War for the Union side of that war. It made me proud. But then again that’s a white American’s response. I needed to dig deeper.
Think about the reaction of many guests on the eleven seasons of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots” produced and hosted by the esteemed literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates, Jr. By the way, I absolutely love that show, I can't enough of it! The guests’ reactions are always both sobering and mind-blowing when Dr. Gates tells them there are slaveholders in their family tree.
So, I thought, did any of my ancestors live below the Mason-Dixon Line and participate in the horror and abomination that was slavery? Of course, I hoped and prayed that the answer was “no.”
In my many years researching my ancestral roots I had discovered that all my ancestors’ original immigrational roots were in New England, the Northeast, and in the Middle Atlantic states or colonies. Or were they?
My paternal aunt, many years ago, offered all the information she had about my paternal roots, but one small nugget she told me led me consider the slavery issue in my own family tree. She told me that her mother, my paternal grandmother, once told her that the McGhee ancestors had lived in the southern United States and migrated to the northeast at one time.
I spent a lot of time looking for that geographical connection. However, I was searching in only one family surname line for that information. As it turned out, I was close, but I eventually found it among my complicated and entangled Smith line. The Smith surname is notoriously difficult to research as it is one of the most common surnames in America.
So now that I have carefully and systematically vetted this information what do I do about it? I believe that once a slaveholder has been identified in a family tree that there is an inherent responsibility to do something about it, however small it may seem.
As we all know, we are not responsible for the “sins of our fathers.” Yet again, once the discovery is made, we are responsible for thinking about and discussing this revelation.
Here are a few ways that some genealogists have channeled their family tree discoveries to perhaps make a small contribution about the history of slavery and the Jim Crow Era, and to the future of the United States of America.
Become involved in projects, organizations, or social media sites that promote awareness and truth such as:
10millionnames.org – 10 Million Names is a collaborative project dedicated to recovering the names of the estimated 10 million men, women, and children of African descent who were enslaved in pre- and post-colonial America (specifically, the territory that would become the United States) between the 1500s and 1865.
The project seeks to amplify the voices of people who have been telling their family stories for centuries, connect researchers and data partners with people seeking answers to family history questions, and expand access to data, resources, and information about enslaved African Americans.
Beyond Kin – This project encourages anyone who is gathering genealogical data about the enslaved population of a particular slaveholding institution or family to add the slaveholder’s names to this directory, whether or not you are a part of the Beyond Kin Project. This will enhance collaboration, allow volunteers to know where work needs to be done, and most importantly, may help the descendants of enslaved persons to find out how and where their ancestors spent their lives in America. In exceedingly rare instances, census records may be found that include a free person of color’s country of origination.
Our Black Ancestry – Our Black Ancestry Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing resources for African American genealogical research, preserving historic materials and properties, and promoting healing of wounds that the legacy of slavery have inflicted upon them. Their primary activity is sponsorship of this Our Black Ancestry (OBA) website.
Family History Fanatics – Devon Noel Lee has some wonderful videos that she has prepared that address various genealogical topics. Some involve how to trace your roots as related to slavery. Family History Fanatics is your go-to source for genealogy education and actionable tips that make researching family history easy. Their popular YouTube channel has been providing viewers with entertaining and educational content for years, and they are proud to bring their mission to a wider audience. FHF strives to make the complicated process of genealogical research more approachable and understandable and are passionate about family history and excited to help others discover their own.
There are many other organizations, universities, and projects to which we all may contribute in several ways. Do some research and find the best fit for you.
Inevitably, the discussion of reparations arises pertaining to the slavery issue. But you may ask, how would we put a monetary value on the legacy of slavery and issue it to descendants of enslaved people? The answer may be that we do not. Instead, as some have suggested, our country should think about investing money in college funds for Black students that suffered a legacy of slavery in their family. Or perhaps abolish state and federal taxes for a certain number of years for descendants of enslaved people.
These are only two of the suggestions regarding reparations. There are many others, both pros and cons. I can say that without a doubt, the case for reparations will not be going away any time soon. Sadly, the divide in this country is great at the present time and unfortunately the reparations issue is just another divisive issue that will not be settled soon.
In conclusion, if you do find information and evidence about slaveholders in your family share it with the people and in the places that need that information to reconstruct the family histories of the many Black Americans. They would be happy to learn from you.
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