Discovering
My Past
By Albert B. Kelly
Forgive
me if I get a bit sentimental around Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, but I
always get nostalgic for them, for those days gone by, even a bit misty-eyed,
the truth is I miss my parents and I always will.
I think
most of us who no longer have our parents with us understand those emotions. To
those of you who still have your parents in this life with the ability to
personally thank or honor them in person, it’s not an opportunity to take
lightly.
Most of
us remember the lessons our parents taught us, the lives they tried to model
for us and assuming you had reasonably good parents, these are at the core of a
host of memories of those days gone by. One way I draw close to my parents and
the many that came before me is through genealogy- researching my generations.
My
interest in genealogy started in 1977 with the airing of the groundbreaking
miniseries of Roots, which was based on Alex Haley’s 1976 novel of the same
name.
Roots begins
in West Africa in 1750 with Kunta Kinte, a warrior captured and brought to
America as part of the slave trade and it covers multiple generations to a
great-great-granddaughter of Kunta Kinte, Cynthia, and ultimately to the
author.
The
result is that I have been fascinated with the idea of discovering my own
family history and how those generations influenced my own life. This process of
discovery has been both frustrating and exhilarating.
It’s
been frustrating in that I wished I had, when I was much younger, asked my
oldest relatives more about their own lives and what they knew of the past even
further back. It’s been exhilarating when I unearth some nugget of history from
my past generations.
I’ve
always maintained that great teachers are born and not made. So imagine my
delight when I discovered that my great grandfather on my mother’s side was a
Professor at a Southern University. More than that, each generation, four to be
exact, has produced a teacher.
Searching
on my father’s side, I have had the good fortune to discover, through DNA
testing, that my generations on the paternal side can be traced back to the
western coast of Africa and because the science is so exact, I was able to
identify the tribe to which many of my ancestors belonged.
Through
my research, I found a listing of the slave ships on which my ancestors, in
chains, were brought to America and sold on an auction block in Virginia. Each piece of that history has allowed me to
walk just a bit taller knowing that the life I live today came by way of the blood,
sweat, and tears of my ancestors.
It’s not
too much to say that each day that I go to work, I feel the weight of that past
and a responsibility to make the most of the opportunities they never had, for
a life well-lived knowing they labored so mightily to survive for the
generations they would never know.
I have been
to the plantation where my slave ancestors worked and toiled. I have also
talked with relatives in my ancestral line whose ancestors owned my ancestors-
coming full circle.
In my
research, I was thrilled to see a portrait of my great-great- grandfather, who served
as a Confederate Captain in the Civil War. In some ways, this type of research
is not for the faint of heart for the simple reason that you have no idea where
that search will lead or what it will uncover.
Knowing
the fascination my own ancestral past holds for me, I would love to establish
and make available some type of genealogy program or resource in our community
that would allow our residents, particularly those who can’t afford it, to
research their own generations.
That
fascination is why I am delighted to work with those who labored to trace the Underground
Railroad and its presence in Cumberland County and our own local history. All
of that is to say that history is not just some abstract thing, but something
very personal when it’s traced through generations leading to our own.
If your
parents alive, they’re the thread between the past and the present so take time
to honor them, ask them questions about your family history and write it down
for the next generation- we likely have much more in common than you might
think.