With all of the recently televised police murders of black people, I have been doing a lot of soul searching. I pay a lot of lip service to not being a racist. But I don’t exactly have a pristine track record. When I was a kid, I did a lot of stupid things. Many, I regret.
But that is not the subject of today’s post. Today, I dipped into the family archives and I did not like what I saw. I share the name of an ancestor that lived during the time of the civil war. He was the patriarch of a family that split up because of the war.
Family lore had always said that the family had a plantation in North Carolina. Their names and places of birth had been long established using Ancestry.com. But I still had that nagging question in the back of my mind: Did my family own slaves? It only took a couple of Google clicks to find the answer from the National Archives. In short, yes. My namesake during the civil war owned 9 slaves.
What I found particularly galling about the documentation was that my ancestor did not even bother to list their names. It was strictly by the book: Age, Sex & Color. Their names are lost to time.
I don’t know how to process this information. And I have just scratched the surface. This was an 1860s census. That side of my family tree goes back to 1602 in America. Who knows what else I might find?
It is ugly, it is wrong, and my family has undoubtedly profited from exploiting the lives of others. I have a lot of thinking to do.
