Theme Song: Finally in 1941 by Don Byron

Last week as my daughter and I were riding in to work/school we were listening to a national black radio show where they were playing a “Black History Month” styled game show.  Three callers were on the air as the contestants and the radio jocks asked them questions like, “What is an HBCU?” or gave them clues to identify black entertainers and public figures.   After listening to what seemed like five minutes to the players trying to find the answer to easy clues about Billie Holliday my daughter turned to me and asked, “Are these really black history facts?”

“Well, they are facts,” I said.  “More like trivia, really.”

“Then maybe this should be Black Trivia Month.”

I can see what she means.  Black History Month has become a chore, remembering big events and important people which have been boiled down to Martin Luther King, The Peanut Guy and DuBois.  We don’t remember anymore than that because it doesn’t relate to us; just because those black people have been able to do something it doesn’t mean anything to the average black student.  That was them, their time, that person. 

Tonight the 2nd half of African American Lives 2 comes on PBS.  The documentary does a genealogical search of famous African Americans with this year including just one “every day” African American.  While revealing information about long forgotten members to them Professor Henry Louis Gates helps to put the past into context.  With actor Don Cheadle he tells him he’s one of the few African Americans who can’t blame white people for the enslavement of his people because his long lost greats were owned by the Chickasaw nation.  In talking with Linda Johnson Rice, president of Johnson publishing company, he tells her of how her 4th great grandfather was intentionally orphaned at the age of 8.  From the revelation her tears begin to flow for the little boy she never knew.

But I think my favorite was when comedian Chris Rock learned that he his 2nd great grandfather served in the union army and became a state assemblyman during the reconstruction era.  The look on Rock’s face said it all.  He then revealed that as a teen he wanted to become president but it was an aspiration his mother steered him away from because in the volatile 60s being a black leader (like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X) meant a short life.  Rock wondered aloud where he would have ended up if he had known that someone he was related to had achieved what he could during that tumultuous time period.

I understand where Rock is coming from.  I remember in the 80s often being told that I, along with other African Americans, were descended from Kings and Queens of Africa.  And it felt good the first couple of times hearing it but after awhile one becomes numb to it because you look around and think, if that is true then why am I where I’m at now?

And it’s easy to look at the achievements of those studied  African Americans in our black history pantheon but if you personally don’t know an inventor like Granville T. Woods or a strong educator like Booker T. Washington then it might not mean a thing.  Some people can take those examples and think, “If they can do it, I can do it too!”  But unfortunately far too many people feel those achievements are beyond their grasp.  They don’t understand how they got there, let alone how they ended up where they are.

Sadly its because we are disconnected from our past.  Not just our lored African greatness but our own individual family histories of who we are in this country.  What happened to our great, great Uncle?  Why does cousin Shay walk with a limp?  Our parents and grandparents and great grandparents didn’t like to talk about themselves.  To ask something simple as “Where did you live?” could get you hushed up quickly with a “Mind your own business.” That is if you even thought to ask.  There is so much shame and pain in the African American past that it’s not surprising that it effects us today.   I remember growing up in the 70s and one of the biggest insults you could give someone was that they were an African (African booty scratcher).  Even though I heard the mantra “Black is Beautiful” and James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” I was still getting mixed messages from the community.  Nappy was shameful, dark skin a travesty and to have been a slave –well, how low can you go?  So our grandparents didn’t tell us about their hard times, probably because they were still living it and we are left to think we have sprung off the top of someone’s head instead of being connected to the past.

Although I haven’t had time to thoroughly search so I havent’ come up with anything new I am still searching.  And I am telling my daughter so she will know and placing them on the Black History Timeline, to personalize it for her.

My father, her grandfather, fought in World War II.  My grandmother came up to Cincinnati during the big Black migration right after the war but then she died of tuberculosis.  My mother used to take me with her to vote when I was little and made me go register to vote for the 1988 election because although sometimes she’s complacent she still believes in change.  This is where we are on the timeline and I’m trying to reach back to bring to her some little known Black History Facts of who we are.

Who are you on the black history timeline?  What are little known facts about your family?  Share.

Theme Song: Family Affair by Sly and the Family Stone

My mother once told me that one of my uncles was married to an aunt that was a distant cousin.  I don’t think they were first or second cousins, but perhaps closer than 6th or 7th.  It seems as if the family had married in with that family once before and it was something not to be spoken of.

“Don’t tell anybody,” my mother said in a hushed tone.  “And don’t bring it up around the family.”

Thinking it was a source of shame I kept my mother’s edict to myself and I’m only speaking about it now.  Why?  Because a few weeks ago I discovered that my grandmother’s aunt married my grandfather’s relative. My mother was related to the male offspring from both sides.  When I mentioned it to her she played it off like it was old news.  “I thought I told you,” she said.  “It’s a small town and a lot of the families intermarried.”

There’s really nothing to be ashamed of because it has been done through the centuries.  FDR and Eleanor were cousins and so was Charles Darwin and his first cousin, Wedgwood.  Writer Steven Pinker tackles the subject in the current National Review  article about the popularity of genealogy.  In the article he writes:

The paradox is resolved by the realization that our ancestors must have married their cousins of various distances and removes, so that vast numbers of the slots in one’s family tree are filled by the same individuals. Imagine, in an extreme case, that your parents were first cousins. Then two of your great-grandparents on your mother’s side would also be your great-grandparents on your father’s side–you would have six great-grandparents instead of eight. Genealogists call this “pedigree collapse”: the necessity that as you trace your family tree backward, it will fan out for a number of generations until it begins to encompass most of the people in the available population, whereupon it falls back on itself, coinciding with the original growth of that population. The rate of collapse depends on the size of the pool of potential mates and the average rate and closeness of cousin marriages. But the fact that our ancestors never covered the surface of the Earth ten deep shows that medium-distant-cousin marriages must have been the rule rather than the exception over most of human history. This chronic incest, by the way, did not turn our ancestors into the cast of Deliverance. The degree of relatedness, and hence the risk that a harmful recessive gene will meet a copy of itself in a child, falls off a cliff as you move from siblings to first cousins to more distant cousins.

Which makes perfect sense to me, although I am not advocating that folks use their family reunions as pickup grounds for finding the pefect mate.   You might know the person’s background a bit better and, hopefully, like your in-laws more but it is pretty much a sticky wicket to explain to your children.  The downside is if there are underlying health problems in your family, such as the Fugates from Appalachia, intermarrying relatives help to exacerbate the problem.

Bio-diversity is the wave of the new millennium.  Go out and get your foreign spouse today!

Theme Song: Sadie by the Spinners

I remember when she died. 

My great grandparents traveled up north to Cincinnati for the funeral.  When they returned they came back with what few belongings she had: two hats, a few dresses, some perfume, and some jewelery.  Maybe Anna could wear those things and they would be handed down to her.  It was the sight of those clothes that set my mother’s mind free.  Her four year old mind  could finally grasp the meaning of death.  “She’s gone!  She’s really gone!” she screamed as she ran out of the house and into the fields, as if she ran fast enough and hard enough she could change the reality of the death or at least be where her mother was.

“Why do you call Grandma ‘Grandma’ but Aunt Anna calls Grandma ‘Mama“?” I asked my mother when I was about the same age she was when her mother died.  There seemed to be a step missing in the family connections, but I couldn’t place my finger on what it was.  I discerned problem had to be the reason why my mother didn’t call Grandma “Mama”.

“That’s because she’s not mother, she’s my grandmother,” my mother said.

“Where’s your mother?” I asked.

“She’s in heaven.”

Heaven?  With Jesus?  Why is she in heaven?  How did she die?  I had too many questions for my mother who never had to field them with my four older brothers.  Yes she was in heaven with Jesus, she died from TB.  I had more questions, but she didn’t want to answer anymore.

I must have been a nuisance as a child.  I must have asked several times what she died of before it finally sank in that it was from tuberculosis.   I wanted to know what she looked like.  My mother told me that my Great Grandmother Cynthia had a picture on her dresser of Fannie.  When I used to go for visits I would stare at the picture.  She had a lazy eye, the left one was turned in a bit but that didn’t stop her from having a big broad smile.  Her hair was perfectly coifed, she had big apple cheeks and a nose that looked like it may have had a hook like I sometimes attribute to native americans.  She also looked very pale in the black and white photo. 

“Was she white?” I asked my mother. 

“No, she wasn’t white,”  she seemed irritated that I would ask such a question. 

“Then why was she so pale?” I asked.  She said it was just the way the picture was taken.  All of Fannie’s siblings where a deep chocolate hue.  Why didn’t she have a picture of her mother, I wanted to know.  She didnt’ know.  No one gave her one, so she just didn’t.

When Grandma Cynthia died when I was 13 I thought my mother would receive the photo then.  I was anticipating having the photo in the house.  For some reason I thought it would give me some answers, as if seeing the photo could help me put the pieces together about my family; maybe it could tell me why my mother was the way she was; why we all seemed so distant from one another although we were in the same city.  I wanted to know why Fannie left her two girls behind with her mother and was that the reason why my mother seemed to have this eternal sadness in her.  My mother was always fearful and always overprotective of me, although not of my brothers and sister in the same way.  My mother was also superstitious.  She has a sixth sense that picks up on when company is coming or if something is unspoken is wrong with her children.  I have that, too.  Once a guy I was dating called me in the middle of the night and I had a conversation with him about how my sister was going to have a baby.  My sister called me the next day from 500 miles away and told me she was pregnant.  I called the guy I was dating to tell him the good news.

“You already told me this, remember?” he asked.

“How can I remember this?  I just found out and then I called you.”

“You told me last night when I called you at 2am.  You said Wanna is pregant.”

“You called me last night?”

I wonder if Fannie could do that, too?  I missed her more than I missed Pearl.  I expected Pearl not to be around because I knew my father was old.  Well, older than most fathers and it was always a death watch because he had a bad heart.  But for Fannie to be gone just seemed unfair that I could miss out on not having one Grandmother.

I have been trying to piece the puzzle together on who she was, how she lived, what she was like.  But no one knows.  All of Fannie’s siblings who are living were born after she was “kind of ” grown and were just a little older than my mother when she passed away.  My uncles are old and don’t remember much; my Aunts are old, but a lot younger than she would have been if she had lived.  How can someone just forget their sibling?  How can she not be talked of or remembered?

“Aunt Geneva, do you remember the day your mother died?” She is my mother’s older sister.  About 3-5 years older (I can’t remember how old).  My Aunt Geneva doesn’t like to remember thing she would rather forget.  She doesn’t remember, she says.  “I was just a child, really young when it happened.”

“How old do you think you were?”

“Oh, I don’t know, five or six,” my Aunt said.  What she does remember are things my mother didn’t.  That my grandmother took my mother to Cincinnati with her and left her behind in Alabama with Grandpa Jack and Grandma Cynthia.  She remembers when one of my uncles brought my mother home to Rogersville because Fannie was too sick to take care of her.

“Anything else?”

“Its so long ago, Nay, what am I supposed to remember?”  she asks me pointedly.  I don’t know.

With that little bit of information I go to work at the library and ask for my friend to help me find her.  I got a copy of her original death certificate.  I found her under her married name of Shoulders in the city directory.  She was working at a drycleaners.  She died January 5, 1947 a few days shy of my mother’s 5th birthday.

I go back with the copies for my Aunt and show her.  “So you were about eight when she died, right?  You dont’ remember anything?  Do you remember anything about her?”  Not a clue.

My grandmother Fannie was a young mother.  Now we would consider her a teen mother, but back then it was normal for young women of meager means to marry young.  They were sharecroppers and Fannie was the second to the oldest, I think.  Maybe the third, I know the oldest died young.  She had my Aunt Geneva at about 13 and my mother at 16.  She didn’t marry either father.  I dont’ know if she even loved them.  My grandfather, Risted she could not have married because he had a wife at the time.

“You were married?”

“Yeah, I was married,” my Grandfather said nonchalantly. 

“Then why did you get with her?  Why did you talk to her?”

“She looked good,” my Grandfather sounded easy going and I could hear some of the charm I could tell he evidently used on women.  He reminds me a lot of my youngest brother.  “I saw her and thought, ‘She has a big butt’” we both laughed but I dropped the conversation right there.  I wanted to keep the naive image of the 1930s with me, where men were chivalrous with less lechery.

At sometime she did marry, though, to a guy named Robert Shoulders.  I don’t know who he was or why she married him.  My family didn’t like him, so my Aunt Anna tells me.  The first time I asked her about him she said she thought she saw him a while back but turned her head because she didn’t want to see him.  The second time I asked, when I really thought I might go searching for him to find out more about Fannie, she told me she heard he was dead.  He actually lived a few years after the conversation.   My Aunt Anna told me the family blamed Bobby for her death.  He had her working hard while he was a layabout, she said.  Don’t nobody want to talk to him, don’t nobody want to see him, she said.  Daddy didn’t like him, nobody liked him.  You won’t learn nothing from him, child.

So my grandmother came to Cincinnati with her husband and child.  No one in the family liked him and according to them he didn’t work (or hardly worked) leaving it up to my grandmother to take care of herself, her child and, perhaps, a no-account husband.  My uncles were here in Cincinnati with my grandmother.  But they weren’t the ones to sign her birthcertificate, neither did her husband.  It was my grandfather Jack who, with his wife,  left his farm in winter to come and bury his oldest daughter.  A few years later they bury another daughter, Beulah who lives close to home.

I still don’t know her but I know her.  All the little bits and pieces that make a life still aren’t coming clear to me.  I have to deconstruct in order to make her real; stand far away from her and disconnect myself to try to get to who she was.  It wasn’t until I was holding the death certificate in my hand that I realized how young she was; she died at 21 and I was just having my daughter at that age.  She could never have imagined me or her other grandchildren or her great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.  At 21 all she could see was what was before her: the necessity to work to make a way for the daughters she had.   I wonder if she knew how sick she was or realized that she was going to die.

“She’s really pretty,” my daughter said as she held a copy of Fannie’s picture in her hand.  We took my Aunt Geneva’s pic to scan it onto the computer.  One of my uncles finally realized that neither of Fannie’s daughters had a picture of their mother and had a copy made for them.  My daughter was mesmerized with Fannie’s pic also.  She sometimes brought it up onto her computer to scrutinize it. 

I can see Fannie in her and I tell her so.  “You look a bit like her, around the cheeks and the shape of your face,” I tell her.  I see Fannie’s other features in my sister Wanna, my cousin Nikki and her sister Tiffany, who also died too young at 21.  Looking back I see some of her in her mother Cynthia and I wonder why I never saw it there before.

Grandma Fannie won’t leave me alone.  She won’t talk to me and tell me what I need to know, but she won’t leave me be to forget her like the rest of the family has.  She hasn’t done anything wrong; how can we go on with life with nary a thought of her?  She never got to hear MLK’s speech, cast a vote or hold her grandchildren in her arms.  She will never be 80 and never know what life could have been and have regrets.  She is forever 21 and young and black and beautiful.

Theme Song: Why We Tell the Story from Once on This Island

For all the ones we leave/And we believe/Our lives become the stories that we weave

The other day this woman came into the department with her father’s death certificate.  She was roaming the net tying to find information about her deceased father’s mother.  She came to me a couple of times requesting help till finally I said she should just go to the genealogy department where they had more resources (and patience) than I could give.

As I walked her to the elevator she told me that she was 70 years old and had no idea who her extended family was.  Her mother was in her 90s and she asked her about the names but her mother told her it wasn’t any of her business to know.  The nonagenarian told her if she wanted her to know, she would have told her.

The woman told me she didn’t get mad, she just resolved to come down to the library and discover the information for herself.  Which, unfortunately, has not happened because there are still more pieces to the puzzle that she needs to gather before she can easily pinpoint him in the census and/or she needs to develop the patience to sit and scan through the census reels (online or off) to try to find the names.

Not every family is that hard, though.  There are families who have at least one person who keeps tracks of the births, marriages, and deaths.  They ask the questions; they write things down.  They are labeled in the family as the nosy one or the gossip.  Some keep the family secrets.   A lot of people don’t see the point in the family historians, that is until they become curious themselves. 

The main reason a lot of us are interested in family history its not to indulge in family gossip, but to find out more about ourselves.  With the short time we are on this spinning clod of dirt we want to know that we are connected to something bigger than what we see.  People seem to think that America/American history is made up of people who have done big things, but reallly the country is made up of people who just do ordinary things and live ordinary lives.  Everyone wants to hear about heroes and they remember the fantastic things they’ve done.  Those are the stories we thrive on, but they aren’t necessarily who we are as a people.  In essence, we are just common people going about with our quotidian tasks.  We are born, we live, and then we die and if we are lucky we get to have a lot of love in between.  Our lives might be comfortable or uncomfortable and if we are lucky we get to leave a positive marker that we’ve passed this way. 

In the mini series “Roots: The Next Generation”, the grandmother tells her grandson ”Family goes on in the flesh and in remembrance”.  Family griots just want to put the flesh on the bones and the spirit into photos of the ones we are decorating our family tree.

Theme Song: Repetition by Charlie Parker

Since yesterday I’m on a bit of a roll.

I have excluded Alferd(Afred) and his wife Fannie as being my direct descendant,  I’m wondering if he’s not a great uncle of some sort.  I will have to look into that later. 

E~ (current genealogist/H&G worker/genealogy adviser/friend) told me to stay on point.  She said its easy to get sidetracked and begin looking for all kinds of names.  I told her I wanted to know the surname of William Bowen’s wife (Mat). 

But, searching back to the late 1880’s I was able to find out that William’s father is Wash Bowen.  His wife is named Synthia.  Wash and Synthia were both from Tennessee.  I got as far as 1880.  I may not be able to take them back further but I will try again another day.

And…

I finally was able to find my G-Grandad Jack on the 1930 census.  They have his name listed as Robison but everyone is there.  My uncles and aunts that I know.  I played around with the surname until finally he popped up.  Its like a puzzle.  You have to figure it out and work things around until you get pieces into the right place.

And another thing: looking around on the census track I noticed again the Fuqua name.  It’s the name that was on the video but I’m unsure of how the families are related to one another.  That’s something else for me to search but not today.  After I check out the video again.  I’m going to take the tape and transfer it to a DVD and maybe (with my daughter’s help) put portions on my blog. 

Yeah, I’m thinking big.  Bigger than I’m capable of I’m sure.

Theme song: You Remind Me by Mary J. Blige

The way you walk and the way you talk and
The way you move and you remind me, yes you do
Of the way you dress and the way you dance and
You really like to move it. You remind me

This is a message to those who wanted to do their family chart but didn’t although you have the resources.  If its calling you, then do it.   Do it then.  I wish I had did it when it first struck me because I wouldn’t be doing all this extra leg work now.

About 10 years ago I was working in the H&G dept at the local library.  A guy used to come in all the time doing his genealogy.  He was young, maybe 19 or 20 (I was 25/26 at the time).   His name was Dante my spelling might be off) and he was up on his genealogy.  He was back to the late 1800s, I believe.  He did a lot of research and went to a lot of the family reunions for the families he found to get more information and learn more about the people.

He was a real people person.

Anyway, I was working the genealogy desk one day and teasing him about going out to Oklahoma for another family reunion on another branch of his tree when he began to look at me funny.  He began to question me about my surname, my mother’s name, what was her surname and her mother’s name.  I looked at him oddly but answered him anyway ’cause it was Dante.  He then began to name all my Aunts and Uncles,  and my grandmother Cynthia.

“How do you know their names?”

He was my cousin.  His grandmother was my great grandmother’s sister.  (I forget which sister).  He then began to tell me he was related to another cousin twice (on the mother’s and father’s side). 

I was in awe that he had so much information stored.  And I was happy to be related to him because I really liked him, he was cool.  I meant to get the information from him but never did.  A few years later he married the local beauty queen and moved away.

I thought it would be easy to retrace his steps but its not.  His living resources are proving to be much more informative than mine.

O Dante, O Dante wherefore art thou Dante?

Theme Song: A Familly Reunion by the O’Jays

 I wish grandma could see
The whole family
I sure miss her face
And her warm and tender embrace

I just came from my Aunt Geneva’s house.  She had a slight (mild) stroke that has made the right side of her face slightly paralyzed.  It was odd seeing one side of her face so slack.  It’s disturbing really.  I still see her the way I did when I was a little girl and now to look at her and realize she’s getting old, I mean really old…

It hurts.

I have been trying to get in contact with her for the last couple of weeks.  Her and Hazel.  Hazel called me back and then I called her back but then that was it.  Aunt Geneva hadn’t called me back because she was sick.  I will call my mother to night to inform her what is going on with her older sister, although I didn’t tell my Aunt that my mother had surgery for cataracts about a week or so ago.

But I went there and tried to get more information about what my Grandmother Cynthia and Grandfather Jack was like.  My Aunt just said they were nice, but she described what the house looked like that they lived in when they were in Rogersville back in the late 40s/early 50s.  At first I found myself tuning out, because its not what I asked but then I realized that was a bit of information I may be able to use someday. She described a house with a tin roof and two big rooms she said the rooms were connected by a hallway that was more like a porch.  In one room her uncles slept and in the other room the girls and grandparents slept.  That room contained a big fireplace and (I think) the stove or furnace… I forget.

(sigh) I’m getting like my Aunt Geneva.  She said that Grandma Cynthia used to talk about her family all the time: her uncles, her aunts, her grandparents and such.  She named names but my Aunt Geneva didn’t pay attention because she didn’t know who the people were.  I wish I could go back in time and ask the questions of my Grandmother that I was afraid to ask but never did because I was scared: like who were her grandparents and how she got the welts on her back.  But now I will never know.

Seven years ago there was a family reunion in Huntsville, AL.  I couldn’t go because I didn’t have a ride down; my uncle that was going to drive me (was if Clifton?  was it Connie?) had a heart attack and so I couldn’t go.  I went to see him in the hospital and he thought that I was my mother.  But anyway, the reunion down in AL was the Bowens-Fuqua reunion.  My aunt bought the video tape and I just now got a chance to watch it.  It was interesting viewing the tape.  I watched a good portion of the video where people were just saying their names and what person they were related to that brought them there.  The sound was bad on that part.  They came from different parts of the country Louisville, Tampa, Chicago and Lima (Oh).  And of course Cincinnati.  I got the feeling that Rogersville is a very, very small town.  My aunt said everyone knew almost everyone when she was there and everyone was related to everyone.  It seems that way because she pointed out a relative with the last name of Watkins (a Watkins married a Roberson) and I was like, Hey!  That’s my grandfather’s surname.  So know I have to dig around and see who this guy is in relation to my grandfather.

But anyway, I finally got to view some of the part where someone did a bit of genealogy on the family.  All I can say is “Thank you, Jesus” that someone did some stuff because searching on Ancestry.com is a b.  Today I played around with it and played around with it and still nothing with the last name of Bowens or Roberson (or anything similar).  The cousin who did it I need to find and say thanks to because maybe now I can do a bit more.

She got back to 1910.  There were three brothers: Simms Bowens, William Bowens, and Charlie (Charley) Bowens.  They were living in Rogersville, AL (and I swear, I searched that).  On the 1910 they just have it as Bowen (sans S). 

Simms Bowen is married to Mary and they have two children named Catherine and Alberta.

William Bowen (my great-great grandfather) is married to Matt (my great-great grandmother) and their children are Sinthia (my grandmother Cynthia) Charlie, Lesley, Lilly, William, and Caroline.

Charlie Bowen is married to Loretta and they have two sons named William and Lucien (spelled Lushion). 

Simms and William are living close to one another and another name on there looks like and Alfred Bowen and Fannie Bowen.  Alfred is 71 and Fannie is 63 which is old enough to be my the brother’s parents.  If that is them (please let it be) maybe I can move further back.  I’m thinking it has to be.  My family has a penchant for naming people after other family members and my grandmother’s name was Fannie.

So I have to search back further.  Get my names together and the birth years right.  Maybe I can finally make some headway on this family tree.

But where is that dark horse Jack Roberson? 

While watching the video tape I asked my Aunt when the next family reunion was.  I felt ashamed about never attending and sending my daughter as my proxy with my mother.  My Aunt said she didn’t know, the older generation is too old to plan it and its now for the younger generation to carry it on.  I mentioned that perhaps we should and said something to the effect that I could help plan and when we went to see Aunt Anna  she told her I was interested in doing it.

“You can’t do it by yourself, its too much,” Aunt Anna said.  “You need a committee, they need to meet once a week, every Friday night…” She then began to tell me how it was to be done, if its to be done properly and offered herself as a member of the board, although she thinks it should be done by the young people.  She mentioned how the last time she helped to organize it a cousin called her bossy.

“Naw, really” I thought sarcastically.

“You need to know who your people are,” Aunt Geneva said.  “You need to know your family.”

I thought about the people I saw on the tape and the names I jotted down.  Years ago I would have dismissed this charge from her and thought I am who I am regardless of who came before me or what blood relations I might have.  Older now, I see I was wrong.  I’m curious about these people who share a similar bloodline, if only if its just to make sure my daughter doesn’t marry a close relation. 

I’m also curious to see what I will find.

Theme song:  Set Me Free by Tarika

Tonight, my husband convinced me to attend a booksigning and documentary premiere for the movie “A Prince Among Slaves“.  It was a really good short film about a muslim Prince who ended up as a slave in Mississippi.  Abdul Rahman Ibrahima was an educated muslim prince from Timbuctoo who was ambushed by on the way home from a battle.  His enemies ended up selling him to white slave traders which is how he ended up on American soil.

At the end of the film Ibrahima’s descendent from Liberia had a family reunion with Ibrahima’s descendent from here in the United States.  Everyone, from the smallest to the oldest was calling out their ancestral names.

One of the presenters tonight made the statement that at the beginning of slavery there were more muslims living in America than there are today.  She said a lot of the slaves that were here were orignally muslims and many of them held onto their tradition and passed them on.  She even played a song that showed how arabic music has influenced black music.  The first song she played was of a male arabic singer, singing the high notes that dive around.  Then she played a song by an old blues singer.  I never noticed before how similar in intonations and vocal acrobatics blues were to that arabic/indian sound. 

But Ibrahim worked tirelessly to free his children once he became freed.  And when he saw it was time to leave he went to back to Africa.  They said that a caravan of gold was coming to meet him in Monrovia until they got word that he had passed away.

He’s an interesting man.  I guess that’s another book to add to my reading list for the summer.

So now, I am back on track.  Well, I’ve always been, I just need to make trips.  I can’t do anything until I can go see relatives on my mother’s side to see if there’s information that I need.  And for my father’s family I need to send away for death certificates –yeah, kinda morbid.

But that is where I stand now

Theme Song: Don’t Run So Fast by Rahsaan Patterson

I am beginning to hate Ancestry.com.

Sunday I searched and I was unable to find anything so today I decided to switch and use Heritage Quest Online which yielded a better result.  With Heritage Quest I was able to do a search in 1900 in Perry County, Alabama.  I don’ t know which last name is correct: Ann Ivery or Ann Ivey.   The information in 1910 had Ann Ivery at 60 years old which would have made her birth year 1850 something.  In 1900 it had Ann Ivey as 35.  The only thing that lets me know that the correct family is my grandmother Pearl.  In 1920 Pearl was widowed at 36 and living in Bibb County, AL.  In 1910 she was 26 and living in Perry County, AL with her husband (Edward Griffin), her children and her mother.  In 1900 she is 15 years old and they are in Perry.  I discovered a sister named Ginnie (or Gennie, Jenny, Jinny…) and she is 22.

I have to go by the age of the children and not the floating age of the parent and the variants of Ivey/Ivery that pops up.  I know I am going to have a problem finding them in the 1890 census simply because a good portion of the census that year was destroyed. 

(sigh)

So…  it also has Ann as being single but in 1910 information was given that she was widowed.   In 1900 she was the mother of 5 children but only two of them were still living.  I wonder if I can find out what happened to Ginnie.  I wonder if she was dead by 1910 or not.

A friend from H&G department just came downstairs to help me decipher some scribbles on the census schedule.  She said that she has a handout from Tony Burroughs that he gave when he did a talk on African American genealogy.  Burroughs is an African American that has done two of his family lines back seven generations.  I don’t know if I can get that far back (or even have the energy to search that far back) but if I can just get to 1870 for at least two family lines I’ll be so happy.

Theme Song: September by Kirk Franklin and Maurice White

“Bah di yah/Tell me you remember/Bah di yah,/When your heart felt like September”

 When I went to visit my cousin Howard last year he gave me an interesting perspective on my father’s family.  I love Howard, though, and I wonder if I got my quirky sense of perspective and a tendency toward dramatics from the Griffin side because Howard is funny. 

One thing I do know about my father’s side is the men have a thing for younger women, it seems.  One day I was in a pharmacy getting a prescription filled and standing in front of me was a woman who looked to be about my age.  I was in my late twenties, early thirties then.  The woman said she was picking up a prescription for a Ward Griffin.  I started chuckling and said to the woman, you know what, that is so odd that is my father’s name.  She got her prescription, left and then came back with another woman asking me who I was and when was the last time I saw my father.  I told her my name and told her I hadn’t seen my father in years because he died in January 1994.  The woman told me my father wasn’t dead and he was living with her. 

I was thought she was insane.  My father was a mack; my mother and his wife were at least 27 years younger than him but I didn’t think he could get a woman this young especially not in his current state.  I asked her if she knew Howard?  She said she did; that Howard was Ward’s brother.

“No, Howard’s my cousin,” I told her.  We were both thoroughly confused.  She kept insisting she was living with the Ward Griffin who was my father and I had no idea who this person was.  He was probably a cousin I had never met.  I only met a few relatives on my father’s side and Howard was the only one who regularly visited while I was growing up because my father helped to raise him when his father passed away.

I went home and called Howard who said, “Yeah, Ward’s my brother named after Uncle Ward.  You never met him?”

So here are two blogs I wrote last year when I did a start/stop on a genealogy search.  Hopefully I (or someone else) will be able to glean some things from them.

The Lives of Black Folks Current mood: hungry Last week PBS showed the end of the tv show African American Lives.   Since I work in a library it has been a topic of discussion for me and two good friends, one who works in History and the other who spends every moment she can researching her family line.  During the weeks the show aired articles have shown up in the newspapers about doing genealogy research, my favorite being this one. Watching the show has inspired me again to do some sleuthing, that and a visit to my maternal aunt.  She called me up on Sunday, the day before her birthday, complaining she lost her birth certificate and the copy of her mother’s death certificate.  Since we have copies of death certificates here at the library for that year I was able to quickly locate it (acutally, Doug located it and made a copy for me) and took it to her on her birthday.  I took Mimi with me because she is doing a family tree chart for her Biology class.  My aunt wasn’t around when we got there so we sat and spoke with my Great Aunt who has always drove me crazy.  Now she’s almost 70 and still irks me at times but I’m cooler with it now.  I don’t visit them as often as I should and so at first I was chewed out for not coming around.  Soon we got around to stories, what it was like when they first came to Cincinnati.  What was my great grandfather and grandmother like.  What was my grandmother like, she died so young.  My aunt is just a year younger than my great aunt but she couldn’t remember her mother at all.  My great aunt had some memories of her although not a lot.  Many times when we go to programs on black history we often deal with historical figures, but not family.  I think that is what I liked most about African American Lives, it deals with what we should be concentrated on this month: the black family.  The icons are important but history is made up of people living, working, loving and dying.  Too often I hear black people speak of the black experience in generalities, not about what their family went through or accomplished.  We took a picture of my grandmother home and downloaded it.  I don’t know if Cricket got all of her questions answered although she did ask for a copy of the picture of her great grandmother.  Next week we are scheduled to see my first cousin on my father’s side to ask him genetic questions.  He always has been funny and Mimi enjoys visiting him and eating his wife’s macaroni and cheese.  More to come on that next week….

African American Lives: part deux
Current mood: frustrated

Early Saturday evening I braved the cold (well in a car) to attend our first book club of the year.  My daughter was in tow because she had plans to meet her friends around 8 over in Cov.  Five people including myself were supposed to show up and only the usual three did: me, D, and J.  I don’t know if it was a tribute to our love of reading, our lack of an exciting social life or we were the only black women stupid enough to trudge out in the cold.

We met at Simones.  It was my 2nd time eating there.  When they used to be next to the laundromat they had a more soulful cuisine.  Now they’ve moved into the new upscale building on the corner and there is no catfish or greens on the menu, only high class fare with entrees on the cheap side begin at 15.00.  Well, the brother is working it out and getting paid.  I can’t fault him for that.

When I get there (and get there late because Cricket doesn’t understand the concept of be ready when I get home) J was waiting inside the door and D was getting her flirt on.  We meet at a bar table because, unbeknownst to me, you need a reservation.  Damn, when have you needed a reservation at a restaurant in the hood?  We are surrounded by white folks so I guess that answers that. I asked her who the guy she was flirting with and she was like, “I think he’s the owner.”  And I was like, Oh.  Hate to tell her, but bruh is “family“.

So, forty minutes into the conversation we finally get down to discussing the book, which my daughter, of course, had to note. Out of the three of us D is the only one who read Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories from the Underground Railroad.  I didn’t finish it because I was too busy reading other things and started the book late and J didn’t finish it because she has mental block against the books I pick and thinks they are all verbose. So we discussed what we could, which sidetracked us onto black history and genealogy.  We all realized that now we have a better understanding of history than we did when we were in high school.  Maybe it’s because we are reading things that interest us or learning more about ourselves that help us put things better into context.  D is big in genealogy and she commented that now learning  more about her history line has helped to put history into better perspective.

I guess I will see as now at the request of Cricket I am learning more about my own family line.  On Sunday we went to see cousin Howard, my first cousin on my father’s side.  From my conversation with him the previous week I wasn’t sure if I could believe anything he told me.  Everytime I talk to him he comes up with a new revelation which he backtracks on and this time wasn’t an exception.  Like a few years ago he said my father’s mother was a white woman (which I don’t think she was although looking back I can’t remember if my father said she was biracial or white).  Last weekend Howard said that my father’s father was white and I’m like, okay, senility is now setting in on my cousin because he’s tripping.  He was altering my image of my dad, claiming he was lighter when he was younger (which could be true).  But my father was not biracial and couldn’t be white and I ain’t claiming just any old white person on my family tree.  I’m like Jeffersons, you gotta show me the DNA before you can come to the family reunion.

So we go there and Howard brings out all these family pictures.  Now he tells me the weekend before that one side of my family are colorstruck and only want to intermarry with other lighter blacks and they have disdain for darker hued blacks .  They like his wife, though, and she verified his story.  And she is deep, deep chocolate.  So I don’t see why they will like her but dislike other darker family members who they are related to by blood and dismiss them just on the basis of color.  So he shows me pictures of nothing but darker family members, none of the lighter skinned ones.  And I’m like, where are the Chicago cousins?  They are part of the ones he claimed were so colorstruck.  If they were they didn’t show it when I visited them years ago.  And one has a son who is darker than me.  They were the ones who showed me a pic of my grandmother and from my memory of the picture she could pass for white or maybe Native American (it was a black and white picture).

Its hard searching out family names with older family members (although Howard isn’t that old, he’s only in his 60s).  The problem is memory.  Things that I remembered my father telling me Howard discredits.  No one wrote things down. On both sides of my family no one has really done a family tree. When my father was alive he didn’t remember his mother’s maiden name.  I guess I can kind of understand it.  People are were so busy working and living that they didn’t think to ask about the past, they just took some things for granted. 

Besides the info for her Biology Class project I think the main thing my daughter has come away with is to check potential boyfriend’s family tree.  Howard is the only one on my father’s family that I really know but I didn’t know he had children.  I just assumed he and his wife couldn’t have children (although I knew she had kids) and here it was he had kids before they married, one a few years older than me.  D talked about dealing with the wall of secrecy while doing her family tree.  Maybe it was the shame of oow births or the stigma of slavery or sometimes people die young and they are forgotten. 

I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to get to an interesting story about the family or if there is one to be had.  The writer/researcher in me wants to keep digging.  I guess I will see what there is to see.