All My Ancestors

written for:

Carnival of African-American Genealogy

Restore My Name – Slave Records and Genealogy Research

Restore My Name – Slave Records and Genealogy Research, will kick-off this African-American themed carnival intended to be a gathering place for the community to share and learn about African-American genealogy.

This first CoAAG theme will deal with how records of slave ownership are handled by the genealogy researcher. Contributors will be asked to write a blog post (at their own blogs) on one or more of the following aspects:

What responsibilities are involved on the part of the researcher when locating names of slaves in a record?

Does it matter if the record(s) are related to your ancestral lines or not?

As a descendant of slave owners, have you ever been pressured by family not to discuss or post about records containing slave names?

As a descendant of slaves, have you been able to work with or even meet other researchers who are descendants of slave owners?

Have you ever performed a Random Act of Genealogical Kindness involving slave ownership records? Or were you on the receiving end of such kindness?

One of the first documents I found when I started working on my husband’s line was a division of slaves when his great-great grandfather Mordecai L. Spindle died in Virginia in 1857.  I remember being stunned.  I was sitting in the Virginia Library and looking at microfilm and just couldn’t move for a while.  My own family had stories of slave-ownership but I’d never seen any corroborating evidence.  But here was name after name after name, including, ironically enough, two enslaved men with the names of my husband and his brother.  With values assigned out to the side of each name to be sure that each of the 6 heirs received an “equal share.”

This is the page that shows the portions for Thomas M. Spindle (at the top) and his sister Alice M. Spindle.  There were 4 other similar lots, one for each surviving child–James E., Margaret B., Sallie, and Mordecai L. Jr.

Later, as I collected more documents on this family, it became apparent that some of these people had been inherited from a previous generation.

So what was I to do with this information?  I chose what I thought were the right moments to share the info with family members and I encountered no push-back.  The news was received solemnly and with not a small degree of discomfort, and we soon changed the subject.  But I felt an ongoing sense that this information might help someone.

In reality, the descendants of the persons names as property in this division may already know about their heritage.  IF, as some evidence indicates, some of the persons assumed the surname of Spindle at emancipation, many of them stayed in the same area of Virginia.  As far as I can determine, very few descendants of this family left the original area of Virginia.  Spindle is not a name that is widely spread.  Looking at the surname distribution for this name at  World Names Profiler shows the concentration of the name is still in Virginia and Texas, where Thomas M. migrated (and had 13 children!) after the Civil War:

So I determined to try to make the information available where I could.  When I collected the wills of additional persons in this family, including the females, that contained the names of enslaved persons, I transcribed the documents and contributed them to the appropriate webpages at the Virginia USGenWeb sites.  (Remember when that was the main way we had to share records online?)  And later I typed up the names and contributed them to AfriGeneas, though I have been unable to find them posted there.

My mind kept going back to these documents when I was reading Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family. And the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.  And Francois Furstenberg’s In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation–one of Washinton’s homes was right across the Rappahannock from where these people lived. Sharing the documents I have is what I know to do.  I’ve also educated myself about doing research on African American families–I took the first African American research course offered at Samford’s IGHR.  On a weekly basis, at my place of work, I assist persons of color looking for their families in the census records.  My finding those early records fit right into my curious nature and insured that I learned more.  And as a teacher and a librarian, I hope some of that learning helps persons looking for their ancestors.

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Written for 52 Weeks To Better Genealogy – Challenge #7

from Amy Lenertz Coffin at http://wetree.blogspot.com/2010/01/52-weeks-to-better-genealogy.html

Play with Google Maps (http://maps.google.com). This is a helpful tool for determining the locations of addresses in your family history. Where your ancestral homestead once stood may now be a warehouse, a parking lot or a field. Perhaps the house is still there. When you input addresses in Google Maps, don’t forget to use the Satellite View and Street View options for perspectives that put you were right there where your ancestors once stood. If you’ve used this tool before, take sometime and play with it again. Push all the buttons, click all the links and devise new ways it can help with your personal genealogy research. If you have a genealogy blog, write about your experiences with Google Maps, or suggest similar easy (and free) tools that have helped in your own research.

As I’ve written here many times, I come from a family of farmers–persons who had land, for the most part.  Those farms and ranches are no longer in the family.  But I can visit any time I like using Google Map.

My maternal grandparents lived on a ranch in South Dakota.

The main buildings were the house and the barn.  The barn, at the time of this photo, sported my grandad’s brand above the doors, Lazy XY.  The house actually faced north, but this is the southern exposure.  It was too cold in South Dakota to have a north facing entry, so we always used the “back porch” as the entry.

My grandparents had moved most of their things back to Texas by the 1980s–they were in their 80s by then and they first spent winters in Oklahoma and Texas with my folks and my aunt and uncle, and later stayed “in the south” year round.  Shortly before my grandmother died in 1998, the house burned.  We don’t know the details, we just know that it burned to the ground.  In a sense, it was a blessing that the house took care of itself–

When I find myself thinking about the carefree summers I spent at my grandparents’ ranch, I look at my photos, but I also often pull up their place on Google Maps:

I can still see the barn and the tree rows planted east of the house to catch the wind and snow.  A trailer home replaces the house for the family that lives there now.  If I really want to, I can move to the right on the map to “roam” the pasture.  And I can follow the road (306th Ave. on this map) a couple of miles down the hill to the little village of Canning where my grandmother ran the country store and post office, and where we lived the year I was in the 6th grade.

This picture brings back lots of memories.

Over there at the left is the beginning of the spring-fed lakes where we swam in the summer time and ice-skated in the winter.  At the right, the “top” of Cactus Loop, is where the school was.  There was a cemetery behind it and a huge hill down the side.  We sledded in the winter and rolled down in tractor tires in the spring.  Why we weren’t killed is amazing to me.  My grandmother’s store and PO was to the left of the intersection of Chesley Rd and 206th St.  It looks like there’s some sort of barn there now.  Above where Spring St, crosses Chesley St. is the church, with another cemetery behind it.  On up that hill takes me back to my grandparent’s ranch.  See the house at the lower right?  I won’t include the name of the people who live here, but my granddad helped build that house–with someone as particular as he was–they got along fine.  The drilled holes for the nails before they pounded them in–no nail guns here.

I have these places, and others, bookmarked on Google Map.  I like visiting them occasionally.  There’s a country cemetery in Beaver County I like to visit–it’s easy to count the miles as I travel down the road, and I know how many miles and which directions it is to visit where my great Aunt Edna and Uncle Gurly lived, and where my great-grandparents lived out there in Beaver County Oklahoma.

And then I can always “drive-by” the house where I grew up (marked with the small white heart)–it’s a different color now but it’s still located across the street from the high school, between the First Christian Church and the Church of Christ on Jackson Dr., and I can drag Main Street if I’m feeling really nostalgic.

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I received and read this book this past week.

I discovered its existence last week.

As I’ve been blogging,  I’ve been working on my Mitchell line.  Mary Mitchell was the wife of John B. Cooper and they were the parents of George C. and Rebekah Ann Cooper.  Both of these children were orphaned by shortly after the Civil War.  I am descended from George C. Cooper–he was my great-grandfather.  The author of From Flour Sacks to Satin is the granddaughter of Rebekah Ann, or “Annie” as she was known.  I did not know my great-grandfather–he died almost 20 years before I was born.  But one of the chapters in this book is entitled “Grandma Hall,”–Annie, my ggrandfather George’s sister.  She knew her grandmother.

Some pages of this book were difficult to read.  It is illustrative of the point that we don’t all grow up in the same family.  My youngest  brother remembers events in our family much differently than do I, for example.  He wasn’t there for some of them, and I wasn’t there for others–his being 6 years younger and having siblings who essentially left home when he was 12, leaving him to be a type of only child, means we were reared in families essentially different in many ways.

That is the case with the story told in this book.  Her story is no less true or valuable or compelling for having been the descendant of Annie.  The bones of the story are the same–the children left Johnson County with their widowed mother after the War, were orphaned, were rescued from Fayette County, Texas from living with a Mr. Burns after the death of their mother, and were returned to Johnson County to live with their grandparents, Job and Elizabeth Landrum Cooper.

Other details and events vary.  According to Flour Sacks, George was offered opportunities to continue his education.  Annie was allowed to only attend school through the third grade, despite her thirst for more knowledge and formal education.  I do know that George was a school teacher–that’s how he met Sallie Duval, his wife.  Annie and her now-blind husband and children were “invited” to leave the Hall’s place.  The subtitle of the book tells the tale: The Story of a Sharecropper Family. These are events of which I have no knowledge–either from firsthand experience or from family lore.  And the author herself says in opening remarks,

“The purpose of this books is not to embarrass or slander anyone in recording the events of my early life, which I believe were unique in the circumstances I experienced.  Through the years I have come to dearly love all of my relatives and appreciate the people with whom I was associated, both living and deceased….”

I am indebted to her for writing this story.  It is on the shelf next to one of her books of poetry she gave me nearly 20 years ago–a collection that includes the thoughts of a young John B. as he looked out over his plowed fields, as the clouds of War approached.  They are treasures.  I wrote her a letter before I received the book, asking her if she wanted to know more about our Mitchell line.  Unfortunately, it was returned–putting it out on the mailbox for the postman to pick up evidently resulted in part of her address washing off the envelope.  I must revise and send it along again–none of us are getting any younger.

And I must express to her directly how grateful I am to her for putting down her story, which is, of course, part of my story.

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Have you used the OAISTER part of WorldCat?  There was a Facebook posting about it after I wrote my original post for this week.

This is the answer to all of us who have wished for a catalog of materials that have been digitized and put online–“books and articles, audio and video files, photos, data sets, theses and research papers” to quote the WorldCat blog.

I’ve used it when it was housed at the University of Michigan, but I played with it some more and I was amazed at the breadth of what was available, including interviews and photos.

Have fun!

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