Tracing Mixed-Race Relatives from Slavery Days
Last week on "Finding Your Roots," Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said it was extremely difficult for African-Americans to trace their slaveholder ancestors, because so many of the usual records are not available. I know what he means.
My generic assumption is that when a white male slaveholder had a mulatto child with an African-American woman slave, that event would have been seen as an embarrassment to the white family. It would have been "hushed up" by whites. And maybe by blacks also, I don't know.
I well remember all that anxiety about "miscegenation," back in pre-civil-rights days. I'm glad all that fuss is over. Or I hope it is.
So I thought, what if I searched from the other direction, from a white slaveholder ancestor to his mixed-race descendants? My ancestors were white slaveholders. I feel certain they had some mulatto children. Finding these second and third cousins of mine would be difficult, but difficult doesn't mean impossible.
Last week, I had a "find."
In the 1880 US Census, there was a mulatto man living not far from my great-grandfather (that is, a few lines above him on the census list). This man had one of our common family names, Tom. He was 26, so I could guess his birth year, 1854. He had a new wife, Lucy, categorized as black, and a new baby daughter, Annie, a mulatto.
For months, I had been trying to trace this man forward in the census, decade by decade. Nothing. No Lucy, no Annie. No such Tom with the birth year of 1854, anywhere in the state or country.
Finally, I thought of looking at the birth-marriage-death certificate list on ancestry.com. And there was the Tom whom I was searching for. He died in 1921.
Tom's death certificate was extremely helpful. It gave his birth date as December, 1855. That was all right, because birth dates on the US Census during this period are just an estimate, counting back from the given age.
Tom's death certificate also listed his father. It was indeed my (deceased) great-grandfather, judging by name and place of residence. The first name of my great-grandfather was slightly misspelled, "Erasitus" instead of "Erasmus." But this is such an unusual first name that I do not doubt the identity.
Tom's mother was listed as Annie. He had named his daughter after his mother!
The person who signed the death certificate, Curley, turned out to be a son of Tom's subsequent marriage to a black woman named Anna. (I still don't know what happened to Lucy and Annie, Tom's first family.) Curley would therefore have been my mother's cousin.
I traced Curley as far as I could. He is in the 1910 and 1920 US Census. Yet in the 1930 Census he is nowhere to be found.
I did find Curley's death certificate, in 1964. I found also a WWI draft registration record for 1917-18, which lists him as a farm laborer for a family in my great-grandfather's town. Curley got his SSN in 1957.
Between 1921 and 1957, though, I have found no record of Curley. I've looked for his two sons, Josh and Tom, and his brother, Roland, on the US Census. Not there.
And here comes the 1940 Census, tomorrow. I hope it mentions Curley.
I've just begun. There are many, many other places I can search.
Robin Foster @savingstories has shared with me a list of suggestions that I will follow up one at a time. I know there are resources on @LCAfricana that will be helpful. Now that so many records are going online, especially for African-Americans, the search for mixed-race relatives is impossible no longer.
This whole process amazes and humbles me. It is requiring as much patience as I can summon, to work past dead ends for further clues.
And I still have no definite idea what is the right thing to do, or say, if (or when?) I finally do locate my mixed-race relatives. I will then try to proceed slowly and carefully.
On this last point, a great big thank-you to those readers who responded to my last post! Your comments gave me a lot to think about. I'll keep thinking.
