The Past We Want to Find
I’ve been reading We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper, about the murder of an archaeology graduate student at Harvard in 1969. This passage jumped out at me last night:
Archaeology is an investigation, [a professor] explained, but it can also be an act of power—of finding the data and then controlling the story. “Every nation-state wants an important past,” [the professor] said. So, often, the ruling parties will commission archaeologists. But sometimes the past that archaeologists find is not what the powers want them to find.
Substitute genealogy for archaeology, nation-state for family, and little is lost. Many of us are determined to connect with our past, and the reasons vary. Many folks are looking for an identity that only their history can provide. Others are looking to commune with ancestors, to understand their challenges and find inspiration in their successes.
Whatever the case may be, few of us are looking for the ugliness that can also come with family history: criminal deeds, for instance, or affairs and secret children.
And some people are very reticent when it comes to slavery. You may remember the hullabaloo over Ben Affleck attempting to hide his own family’s complicity in that moral crime. (He later apologized.)
I was lucky to have a client recently who wanted to know whether members of her family had enslaved others. And yes, they had. The men, women, and children they enslaved could be found in tax records, the census, wills, and estate inventories, often with names attached. It was clear, too, that the wills may have broken up families, such as when a father bequeathed his two sons “all the negroes to be equally divided between them.”
From an estate inventory: “One head of cattle, $31.25; One sheep, 1.25; One bay Horse, 1; One negroe woman named Hannah, $300; One negroe boy named Shelton, $200; One negroe boy named Clark, $150; One hog, 1.50.”
This particular family has three great branches—in Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky. Family members took sides accordingly during the Civil War, with Virginia and Indiana cousins facing each other at Gettysburg and a Kentuckian marching to the sea with Sherman. Interestingly, slavery did not necessarily figure much into those loyalties. I found no evidence the Kentuckians were antislavery, for instance. They too enslaved others. And the Indianans had originally come from Virginia and settled in a part of the territory most hospitable to slavery.
It’s complicated, in other words. But it’s an important part of the story and I’m glad my client wanted to know the facts of it.
How we fashion a narrative around that ugliness—what meaning we give it—is an individual’s decision. To quote another line from the book I’m reading, “Scholars of history don’t uncover the past; they create it.”
If you’re interested in learning more about your family, check out Black Sheep Genealogy’s services and then send us an email. We can’t wait to hear from you.
Image at top: “An Overseer Doing His Duty near Fredericksburg, Virginia,” by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, ca. 1798