My two-cents worth and then some. An online journal by LP Brown.

Browsing Category Genealogy

When the Family Tree Rings

by on ·Family, Genealogy

I’m sitting here, fingers flying across the keyboard, deep into writing about ancestral detective work, when my phone rings.

“What’s up?” chirps the voice on the other end, “You busy?”

“I’m writing a blog post,” I said.

“What’s it about?” He asked.

“Genealogy,” I reply.

“Another one?” comes the response, dripping with enough judgment to fill a family Bible.

I’ll admit, I immediately considered channeling my inner drama queen and belting out a “BYE FELIPE!” (That’s the male version of saying, “Bye Felicia.”) and dramatically slamming down the receiver. But my professionalism, good manners, and fear of breaking my phone prevailed. So I sat listening, rolling my eyes, and tapping one foot until our conversation ended, and I got back to writing this.

My daughter, Nikki (named after the incomparable Nikki Giovanni), has caught the genealogy bug. Trust me, once bitten, it’s harder to cure than the urge to pop bubble wrap.

I remember reading Giovanni’s poem Scrapbooks in the ’70s when bell-bottoms were all the rage and disco was king. One line from that poem remains etched in my memory, “Sometimes it seems my life is a scrapbook.” I find that so relevant.

Delving into genealogy is like playing detective in your family tree; you dig with a symbolic shovel and examine findings with a magnifying glass. If you’re lucky, you will discover a treasure chest of memories, and every time you uncover a new tidbit about your ancestors, it will add another entry to your scrapbook.

Now, Nikki’s interest has been peaked, and I’m thrilled. She’s planning to take the AncestryDNA test to learn more about her deceased father’s family history, potentially connecting with unknown relatives and strengthening existing relationships. Since her father and I separated when she was an infant and eventually divorced, she and her brother had very little interaction with his side of the family. Her curiosity is heightened by the fact that foster parents raised her father, and although he knew his sister who was with another family, neither of them knew their birth parents; she’ll undoubtedly be looking for a needle in a haystack.

Thankfully, her quest to learn about her grandparents and great-grands on the maternal side of her family won’t be as challenging since I’ve played detective with our family history for years and even wrote a book about it.

As luck would have it, my cousin Velda, bless her heart, created a small but remarkable photo album a few years back showcasing our paternal lineage. This treasure trove is brimming with family snapshots – featuring my father, her father, their siblings, some spouses, and our grandparents. A brief description of the subjects thoughtfully accompanies each image. Coincidentally, some cousins on my mother’s side compiled a similar photo collection after our 2018 family reunion. These two volumes form an impressive set destined to be cherished heirlooms for generations.

Because a family tree is a wild world of roots and branches, there’s always another story to uncover, another mystery to solve (and another blog post to write).

Discovering our forebearers’ hardships and challenges can make us more empathetic and appreciative of our culture and life experiences. Look at Alex Haley. His discovery of his ancestries and the subsequent writing and publication of Roots profoundly impacted his life. In addition to bringing him tremendous success and recognition, Roots became a #1 bestseller, a widely-watched TV miniseries, and won Haley a Pulitzer Prize. His success also sparked widespread interest in genealogy and African American family history, inspiring many others, including myself, to explore our roots. Tracing lines of descent through generations using oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other sources serves as a valuable family heirloom and historical record. Alex Haley’s Roots inspired esteemed author Henry Louis Gates Jr. to learn his own ancestry. He later developed a PBS series, “Finding Your Roots.”

Nikki may never write a best seller like Haley, but I will encourage her pursuit. And one more thing about genealogy. I must tell you that my cousin, Tanya, has more enthusiasm for family history than a squirrel has for nuts. In 2014, she went on a wild ride through our family tree, mapping out every twig and leaf like she was trying to win the genealogy lottery. She didn’t just scribble our family tree on the back of a napkin. No, sirree, she went full-on digital diva and left a jaw-dropping Genealogy Report on the MyHeritage website, created by another cousin, Dwayne. Dwayne, bless his tech-savvy heart, had long ago set up the online family hub that facilitated Tanya’s project. Not only is the genealogy bug highly contagious, but in our case, it’s a family affair.

As I see it, life’s just one big scrapbook, and most of us try to make our pages uplifting and worth reading!

As Marcus Garvey said, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.”

 

 

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Blowing Leaves off Family Trees

by on ·Family, Genealogy

“We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.”

– Robert Frost, The Secret Sits

Ancestry.com is breaking up families, according to a segment today on The View. The cohosts discussed a case where a son requested a DNA kit from Ancestry.com and learned from the results that his dad is not his father. Instead, it turns out his father’s brother and his mom had an affair (the mom admitted it), and the man the boy thought was his uncle is his father. Upon hearing that, I felt like doing what one of the cohosts did: shout out to the uncle in my Maury Povich voice, “You are the baby’s daddy!” (LOL. I couldn’t resist.)

Revelations from Ancestry.com and enthusiastic genealogists everywhere expose secrets and blow more leaves off family trees than an F3 tornado.

All families have secrets. There are no exceptions; the rich, the famous, the poor, and the unknown have skeletons in the closet, and even pulverized bones sometimes yield secrets.

Years ago, when I took it upon myself to become the family genealogist, I began digging into my immediate and extended family history. I searched archival and other public records and solicited narratives from family members, who trusted me and divulged information on the condition that I bury it (and not in the pages of a book). Some of my sources are now deceased. Some writers would say that once the source dies, all bets are off. I’m not one of those.This sleuth unearthed revelations about a rape, a near-fatal abortion (not the rape victim), an ill-conceived and nearly disastrous intercontinental romance, out-of-wedlock births, and shotgun weddings. Decades ago, when morality and ethics were reverenced, some of those events were scandalous; today, many would not raise an eyebrow.

Unfortunately – or fortunately – depending on how you view it, all of our lives are an open book today, in many ways, thanks to Google. Who hasn’t done or experienced something we regret and hoped to conceal? It doesn’t matter whether the act occurred when we were young and dumb or old and foolish. In every family, remnants contributing to “the history of us” are everywhere. Even wrongdoings and foolish deeds that are not necessarily secretive await discovery. History can be covered up but not erased. It is stored in someone’s memory, logged in a journal, or tucked like a metaphorical note in a bottle waiting to be plucked from the ocean of time.

A family genealogist will inevitably come across some zits that are not secrets but are well-known truths, seldom discussed because they are embarrassing or unpleasant.

Just as there are two sides to every family, paternal and maternal, there are secrets aplenty. History. Herstory. Our stories.

Over the years, I’ve learned that before sharing “a secret,” one should think twice about the profound words of Benjamin Franklin, “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”

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Resurrecting Memories for Legacy II (revised)

by on ·Genealogy

My parents once lived in this cabin. Photo taken by Dwayne White in 2013. ©

 

This is a revised version of a previous post.

Curiosity drives some of us to become amateur genealogists because we enjoy learning about our ancestors and distant kinfolk. We also appreciate the importance of family history and want to preserve the information for future generations.

I was blessed to be the first of Hattie Staton, my maternal grandmother’s, 21 grandchildren. Although circumstances, like birth order, sometimes work against us, being the first-born grandchild also has its advantages. We tend to remember things that our younger siblings and cousins may not recall or may never have known.

The process of writing my second book is awakening memories of distant relatives and my interactions with them.

Rhea Williams was the first cousin to my Grandma Hattie (who we called Maw). I recall meeting Cousin Rhea only twice. Both meetings occurred when I was a very young girl, probably not even eight, and Cousin Rhea was in the winter of her life. I initially met my cousin when my mother took me to visit her home on the outskirt of Oak City, North Carolina. She lived in a tiny cabin down the road from grandma’s place. (Although I’ve been unable to confirm it, I was told that it was the same cabin my parents had lived in for a short while before they moved to DC.)

I suspect that mother was preparing me for the visit when she told me before we arrived that Cousin Rhea was partially blind. A frail-looking, slow-moving woman greeted us at the door and invited us into her dimly lit one-room home. Cousin Rhea’s body was stooped by age then, and thin strands of white hair puffed around her head. Childhood curiosity led me to rudely stare at her, curious to see what a blind eye looks like. I decided that the sightless eye must have been the one that was fully closed as if it were sleeping, the other eye was partially open.

Cousin Rhea appeared to be a kind woman; she smiled at me while reaching one scrawny arm toward me to take my hand, which I refused to extend. “How you doing child?” She asked in a whispery voice. I timidly backed away from her. Clinging to my mother’s side; I pulled on her skirt, concealing my face, and clung to her during the duration of our visit.

The last time I remember seeing my cousin was when her grandson, Perch, dropped her off to visit with our family at our home in Washington, DC. And I’ll never forget what happened the first night that she was there.

It must have been after midnight because everyone in the household had gone to bed and they were probably asleep when I awakened to go pee.

Sluggishly, I climb out of bed and walk toward the bathroom, where I switch on the light and step toward the toilet. I am about to turn around and sit when something on top of the tank catches my eye. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. There is a mason jar partially filled with water, and resting near the bottom of that jar is an eyeball.

For a second, as I am standing there, I think I’m dreaming. I stare in wide-eyed disbelief at the lidless eye in the jar. The eye stares at me. I stare back at it. Never in my young years have I seen an eyeball that wasn’t in someone’s face. The sight transfixes me until my imagination fools me into thinking that the eye is moving. Now it is floating to the surface.

Suddenly, wide awake, I switch off the bathroom light and sprint like the Road Runner fleeing Wile E. Coyote back to my bed. I throw the covers over my head, and until I fall asleep, I lay there shivering and praying that I won’t wet the bed because there is no way I am going back in there until daylight.

The following day when mother and I are alone, Cousin Rhea may have still been sleeping; I ask her about the eye in the glass in the bathroom. She says that’s Cousin Rhea’s glass eye and then explains that the artificial eye replaces Cousin’s natural eye and that she removes it each night before going to sleep. Although I accepted my mother’s explanation, my young mind refused to comprehend, and I left many questions unasked. Where does someone find a glass eye? Do you buy them at the grocery store? How do you put it in and take it out? Can the glass eye see me?

As an adult, looking back on what then was a chilling experience but is now an amusing memory, I decided to do some research on glass eyes. I was surprised to learn that the first in-socket artificial eyes were made as early as the 15th century. And contrary to what the naive little girl believed, a prosthetic eye (as they are now commonly called) cannot restore vision. It is merely for cosmetic purposes.

Today, a custom prosthetic eye cost will run you somewhere between $2000-$8000. If you are lucky, health insurance will cover the cost. Recently, my out-of-curiosity search on eBay found glass eyes selling for as little as $30.

I don’t know the cost of Cousin Rhea’s glass eye. I suppose they were less expensive back then. According to a now-deceased family member, the county welfare department paid for Cousin’s eye.

You are probably as curious as I was to know how Cousin Rhea lost her eye. Over time, narratives tend to get distorted, but I will retell the story as it was told to me.

One day Cousin Rhea was visited by a circuit preacher as they were sometimes called back then. During the act of blessing her, the preacher poured oil on Cousin’s head. I wonder if he was attempting to follow the Scripture that reads, “Thou anointest my head with oil.” I don’t know. Anyway, some of the oil rolled down Cousin’s forehead into one eye. (I imagine that must have burned like hell.) Not to make light of the issue, but the blessing apparently did not cover the eye that got the oil because it cost Cousin her sight.

I don’t know who, if any, of my cousins or siblings remembers Cousin Rhea. Although my memories of her are vague, memories of her grandson, Perch, are more vivid. He lived in DC as we did and I remember him often visiting my parents at our family home, and in later years, when I was married, he, his wife, Martha, and their two children lived about half a mile from my home in Suitland, Maryland.

Perhaps someday in the future, after I am gone, if one of my kinfolks decides to do a family genealogy study, this tidbit of information about Cousin Rhea and Perch will be helpful.

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