Walls Tumbling Down: Teaching Black Family History and Genealogy in Social History Context

Abstract

30 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 83, NO. 2 (EXTENDED DIGITAL VERSION) 83 No.2 WALLS TUMBLING DOWN: TEACHING BLACK FAMILY HISTORY AND GENEALOGY IN SOCIAL HISTORY CONTEXT By Katherine Scott Sturdevant Family history—which to this historian means the rich, contextual narrative of a family over time (the “flesh”) built upon the skeletal genealogy charts of names, dates, and places (the “bones”)—has become increasingly popular, with so many trends to prompt its rise. Those trends, of course, include the website dominance of Ancestry.com; the intriguing but everchanging results of DNA testing; and the appeal of “finding family” stories through all media. African American family history is no exception to these trends; indeed, it has spawned some of them. So many of us who practice family history are fulfilling needs, goals, obsessions, and callings by researching, recording, analyzing, synthesizing, and legacy-making. Most important: sharing precious primary sources of family history—such as recording oral tradition or preserving documents, artifacts, and photographs—is a service to society and to the history of all of us, by capturing resources before they are lost. Therefore, teaching students to do family history well, with best methods, and conscientiously interpreted in the context of that family’s times, is a gift to the historical record as much as any research results from historians’ scholarly work with primary sources. Overcoming “the Brick Wall of Enslavement” “Brick wall” is a popular genealogical term for an informational barrier one hits in generational research, a barrier that frustrates the researcher, who tries many ways to address the problem, to find the sources and methods that will get around the barrier. Some African Americans have been understandably reluctant to attempt genealogy and family history over the years, because of “the brick wall of enslavement.” Enslavement can be a research barrier. When people refer to it as such, they mean that records showing Black people by name diminish (or the names change) when researching back to the pre-emancipation period of history. This is a problem but is not insurmountable. As shown often on the PBS series Finding Your Roots with historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. (and in his earlier series African American Lives, featured in the following Lesson Plan), there are ways around this brick wall. Censuses and schedules of people who were enslaved show how many Black people and White people were on a plantation, with their gender and age indicated, and this is useful information, though painful. Gathering statistical information like that can make it apparent which enslaved person is your ancestor. Indeed, Reconstruction (the period after the Civil War when Union troops occupied the South, 1865–1877) is a rich period for family research. Former enslaved people sometimes seem suddenly born full-grown into historical records because, during this period, the Freedmen’s Bureau first identified them as named individuals. This is when you see them searching for their separated family members; legally marrying someone who might be new to them or might be someone to whom they were unofficially married already; and choosing new legal first and last names. Freedmen’s Bureau records are some of the richest in which to start a search, but you are starting after emancipation, after likely new identities, and after probable disconnection with the previous “owner.”1 BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 83, NO. 2 (EXTENDED DIGITAL VERSION) | 31 83 No.2 One modern source can catapult the researcher over the brick wall of enslavement to a much earlier time: DNA. As interpreting DNA becomes more sophisticated, Black researchers can see general locations and cultures of their African origins. This can seem disappointingly broad and distant at first, but is a great discovery. With that information, a person can research those African cultures and perhaps even pinpoint likely routes and time periods of transit to the Americas. DNA also offers the opportunity for researchers to find and connect with fellow descendants of common ancestors. As fellow descendants contact one another—say, through a medium like Ancestry.com messaging—and form a network, they can better discover the locations and identities of the owners and their enslaved people who were previously anonymous. Each advancement is not a panacea, so the...