From roots-in@bl-12.rootsweb.com Wed Mar 5 11:15:04 1997 Received: from bl-4.rootsweb.com (root@bl-4.rootsweb.com [204.212.38.29]) by bl-12.rootsweb.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA05141; Wed, 5 Mar 1997 11:15:04 -0800 Received: from bl-12.rootsweb.com (roots-in@bl-12.rootsweb.com [204.212.38.28]) by bl-4.rootsweb.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with ESMTP id LAA30405 for ; Wed, 5 Mar 1997 11:17:30 -0800 Received: (from roots-in@localhost) by bl-12.rootsweb.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) id LAA05135 for roots-approved@rootsweb.com; Wed, 5 Mar 1997 11:15:02 -0800 Received: from bl-12.rootsweb.com (slist@bl-12.rootsweb.com [204.212.38.28]) by bl-4.rootsweb.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with ESMTP id HAA21978 for ; Wed, 5 Mar 1997 07:55:14 -0800 Received: (from slist@localhost) by bl-12.rootsweb.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) id HAA09214 for roots-in@rootsweb.com; Wed, 5 Mar 1997 07:52:45 -0800 X-Envelope-From: jonesc@sprynet.com Wed Mar 5 07:52:43 1997 Received: from bl-4.rootsweb.com (root@bl-4.rootsweb.com [204.212.38.29]) by bl-12.rootsweb.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id HAA09203 for ; Wed, 5 Mar 1997 07:52:43 -0800 From: jonesc@sprynet.com Received: from m4.sprynet.com (m4.sprynet.com [165.121.2.96]) by bl-4.rootsweb.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with ESMTP id HAA21970 for ; Wed, 5 Mar 1997 07:55:09 -0800 Received: from 199.174.138.115 (ad11-115.compuserve.com [199.174.138.115]) by m4.sprynet.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id HAA22311 for ; Wed, 5 Mar 1997 07:50:27 -0800 Date: Wed, 5 Mar 1997 07:50:27 -0800 Message-Id: <199703051550.HAA22311@m4.sprynet.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: All List Members PLEASE READ To: ROOTS-L@rootsweb.com X-Mailer: SPRY Mail Version: 04.00.06.14 Sender: roots-in@rootsweb.com I am forwarding the following so that list members will see the importance of not ignoring emails from those researching African American ancestors. If you see surnames and/or locations that coincide with yours, please consider the fact that you may hold valuable information in your own files that will allow someone to find an elusive ancestor. As you will read below, research prior to 1870 becomes much more difficult for those of us who are researching African American ancestors. Wills, diaries, letters, family stories and other information in your possession may unlock doors. Christine Jones (jonesc@sprynet.com) <---- Begin Forwarded Message ----> > Date: Wed, 5 Mar 1997 00:40:51 -0600 (CST) > Reply-To: vknelson@webex.com > From: Valencia King Nelson > To: Multiple recipients of list > Subject: Searching The Slave Ancestor: Successfully! Clues to the past: A search for slave ancestors leads to a reunion By Laura Berman / The Detroit News For five years, Katie Brown Bennett has taken a journey into her family's past, one that she had been led to believe was impossible. It was not impossible, only difficult. "Time, money, love, sweat, blood, tears and love" were involved, in the words of a rediscovered cousin, Theodore Sain, one of a thriving clan of Detroit relatives Bennett encountered on her journey. She began with only the scantest knowledge of her family's history and has not finished yet, even after publishing a 514-page book that details the genealogy of three family lines dating back to a 1749 slave-ship log. In Soaking the Yule Log: Biographical Sketches of the Brown, Cheshier, Sain and Allied Families 1749-1995, Bennett carefully pieces together a compelling family history. "It was a quest for things I knew nothing about. Until I began, I never realized how little I knew," says the Colorado Springs resident, who delved into her family history only after her parents had died and her 30-year career with IBM as a computer systems engineer and executive had ended with her 1991 retirement. Saints in Colorado Springs, she uncovered records preserved on microfilm that harbored secrets and stories, waiting only for a Katie Brown Bennett, a person with the passion and the patience to uncover them. Although she quickly traced her lineage back to 1870 using census records and the bits of knowledge she knew about her grandparents, as her research pushed back into time, she faced a cruel reality. Suddenly, she was no longer looking for people, but for property. She was searching, not for certificates of birth, marriage and death -- the official records that document human existence -- but for records that accompany the sale and transfer of property. On the day she first found a record of her great-great-grandfather Squire Cheshier, it was in a bill of sale for "a Negro man named Squire, about 27-years-old...sound in body and mind...Bargained and sold for five hundred and twenty five dollars." To see this evidence, preserved on microfilm, "of a man being sold like a refrigerator or a toaster" was an emotional moment, at once joyful and sad: Here was her first encounter with a great-great-grandfather, one she had hoped but didn't dare believe she would find. Now he existed, a piece of her flesh-and-blood, in a document that spoke directly to the harshness of the world in which he lived. She cried that day, as she would again in the course of research that ultimately took her to archives in North Carolina and Tennessee, and to reunions with relatives she hadn't known existed,including three Tennessee matriarchs in their 90s, who helped her weave together the disconnected threads of the past. It was through them that she realized how two unrelated families named Sain intersected into her history. Without her nonagenarian cousins and their memories, she might never have understood the lineage. Her parents' families had all once lived in Hardeman County, Tenn. As she traced her families' lines, following the names Brown, Cheshier and Sain, she faced history that she never could have imagined. To trace her African-American family, she needed to study the records of white families, the families who had owned her ancestors and whose names they had taken. Her own history, she found, was deeply entwined with these plantation owners, in some cases by blood. To Katie Bennett, who loves to work puzzles as a hobby, the past became a tricky, time-consuming exercise in problem-solving that she couldn't shake. Every clue led to another, and as she worked and researched, her obsession grew. A great-grandfather, David Brown --who is also Detroiter Theodore Sain's great-grandfather -- was the offspring of Malinda, a slave, and Hiram Boswell Brown, whose brother was Malinda's owner, and who lived on the Brown plantation as a teen-ager. Although she could not unravel the secrets of that union, she presumes that love was not involved. She learned, though, by speaking to people in Hardeman County, that Hiram had acknowledged David as his son. "I realized that I needed to learn about the white family, as well, because their blood runs through my veins, too. To not learn about them would be denying part of who I am," she says. If her research sometimes tested the limits of her compassion, it also provided her with unexpected avenues for empathy. In the records of an 1848 plantation sale, she learned of the sale of her great-great-great-grandmother Edny. But she found herself unexpectedly moved by a diary entry from the slave-owner's 10-year-old daughter Lucy, who described herself weeping as her "friends" were sold away from her, and of wringing her wet handkerchief, then filling it again with tears. Bennett contacted a white descendant of North Carolina plantation owners, Paul Griffith, who had researched his own family's history -- the family that had owned her family. From him, she learned of the "yule log" legend that became the title of her book. It was said that the slaves were allowed on Christmas to stop working for as long as the yule log would burn -- and that the slaves ingeniously discovered how to soak the log just long enough to extend its burning time. That legend spoke to the resourcefulness of Bennett's ancestors, "that they'd found a way to push back the constraints that people had imposed on them and to take some small control, whatever they could, over their own lives." She came to see vividly how that lack of control ruled their lives, how chance events -- like an owner's death -- could tear apart a family. Her family. Poring over old wills, she discovered that Malinda and Malinda's two siblings, Wilson and Susa, were each passed to different owners when their original owner died. Each then took on the names of their new owners, in a quirk of fate that separated the families for generations, until Katie Bennett rediscovered the connections linking Wilson Sain, Susa Cheshier and Malinda Brown, and contacted "new" cousins. "Found again after almost 100 years," says Bennett, whose research has revived relationships with the Sain family in Detroit she didn't know she had. "It's truly amazing." Yet as often as she faced the harshness of her family's history, Bennett also found evidence of their character, adaptability and personal morality. Of great-great-grandparents who, denied the right to marry, formed lifelong marriages anyway, solemnized only by "jumping the broom." Reading between the lines of 150-year-old documents, she seized on signs of strength and integrity and determination. In an old letter from a peeved slaveholder she found preserved in the Tennessee state archive, Bennett saw herself as the slave Grace, her fourth great-grandmother, born in 1772, who escaped from her owner in 1820. "The conduct of Grace has been so inexcusable," he wrote to his daughter. "I don't know what to do with her. You must not think to make her behave well by good treatment. You must be strict with her and have her well-whipped for the first misconduct." To 20th century eyes, Grace's rebellion -- at age 48 -- reads not as a child's misbehavior, as it appeared to her owner, but as a courageous decision risked by a mature woman. For what reason, though, had Grace taken that perilous risk? For Katie Bennett, such questions mean that her search for answers about the past continues. Research tool Soaking the Yule Log is family history, but it also details how anyone interested in pursuing genealogical research, especially into African-American families, can find and use historical records and oral history. The book can be ordered by contacting Katie Brown Bennett, P.O. Box 49732, Colorado Springs, CO 80949-9732. Katie Brown Bennett is still seeking members of the Brown, Cheshier and Sain families that she may not know and who live in the Detroit area. If you know of any family connections, contact her at the above address. A family reunion for all members of the three families isplanned for July 11-13 in Colorado Springs. -- Laura Berman Copyright 1997, The Detroit News <---- End Forwarded Message ---->