Yet Another Confession: I Used to Practice Casual Genealogy

I’ve got a different sort of confession to make in this blog post. It’s about how I got hooked on genealogy, but came to control my addiction.

At first, you see, I didn’t take it all that seriously. Of course, as an extension of my love of history, I’ve always wanted to know more about my particular family’s history. Like other white privileged people, I enjoyed my connections to First Families of Virginia. I was a history major in college when Roots was published in 1976, which was about when a new wave of people started to look for the Kunta Kinte in their family tree. At the same time, I blew it off because I knew any two of us have a shared ancestor if we go back far enough. They say everyone who descended from Europeans is related to Charlemagne, right? 

From time-to-time BC (before computers), I would indulge in a little casual genealogy. I would dabble in library research or have a conversation with family members. It wasn’t until around 2000, with so much material online, that I began to use the computer to capture and record my findings. For example, I found an article online, Climbing the Family Tree, that had been printed by the Daily Press on 4 February 1973. The article reported on the Hudgins family of Mathews. I was so excited to add all of the names and dates to my family tree on Ancestry.com! Soon after that, I asked my mother to go with me to visit a cousin, who gave me several sheets of paper with a genealogy of the Foster family. Likewise, I added the names and dates to my family tree without question.

They were just placeholders, I thought. But life got busy and I put genealogy aside. Meanwhile, my Ancestry.com family tree was exposing itself, making its content available for all to see and copy, replicating itself over and over. (Now that I know better, I feel so dirty.)

I wrote a novel that was selected by the Mathews Memorial Library as its 2005 "Read it Mathews" book. While in Mathews for various book talks, I ran into a chorus of “I’m related to you” and “You’re my cousin.” This caused me to go back to my Ancestry account and from my records produce an article, Mathews Connections, for the Gloucester Genealogical Society’s journal, Family Tree Searcher. Soon thereafter, Becky Foster Barnhardt, head of Genealogy & Family Research Services at the Mathews Memorial Library, took me to task for a statement I made about Richard Foster marrying . . . oh dear . . . actually, I’m not going to finish this sentence for fear it will be copied by someone mistaking it for the truth. I had repeated something from the old family history I was given by my cousin, as mentioned above. Becky was right, of course. I had been to the Isle of Wight Clerk’s Office and found no for-sure documentation, but the old genealogist might have been on to something, so I mentioned it. It was a no-no, but Becky should be proud of my restraint. There was even more to the old family history that I actually checked out and discovered was a total fabrication. So, I had stopped with Richard Foster and the unmentionable thing. Thank goodness, or Becky would have had my head on a plate.

In 2007, I published Images of America: Mathews County.
While spending many nights in Mathews to do research, I felt my ancestral ghosts all around.

A few years later, genetic genealogy was making a splash. I realized that my father was getting old and if I was ever to figure out how we were connected to the Lewises of Warner Hall in Gloucester, I needed to send his spit to Family Tree DNA. I did, and what a surprise. Dad was a Haplogroup I and the FFV Lewis family of Gloucester is a well-documented group whose descendants are Haplogroup R. Not even close. In fact, even more surprising, Dad’s DNA is related to a variety of people with surnames other than Lewis, especially people with the surnames Evans and Webb. I wrote about my findings and the article, Applying Genetic Genealogy to FamilyHistory Research, was published in the Gloucester Genealogical Society’s journal, Family Tree Searcher, in 2008. I read with great interest Adapting to the New World  and learned that 75 percent of 17th-century Virginia immigrants were indentured servants. The other 25 percent were younger sons of the gentry, for the most part. They came because of the opportunity, not because they really wanted to. I don’t think I would have left England back then unless I absolutely had to. Three months on a small boat crossing the Atlantic to who knows what? No thank you. Some came to hide family secrets or because they were in trouble with the law or some other scandal. It is no wonder that while I can trace many of my Mathews ancestors back to an early or the earliest immigrant, I’ve yet to find a single thread connecting any one of the hundred or so back to the Old World. I started a Family Tree group called Early Chesapeake to see if I could make some connections, but no luck yet.

Soon enough, I was discovered by a group of Foster descendants in the Family Tree DNA Foster Surname Group 8.  They were looking for a person with documentation to a Foster listed in the Kingston Parish Register. I raised my virtual hand. Richard Foster and wife, my 5th great grandparents, had a son, Peter, my 4th great grandfather. His birth and baptism are in the Register. I have a male cousin in Mathews who I convinced to have his spit analyzed. From this we know that all of the Foster descendants in the FTDNA Group 8 are related to documented Kingston Parish Fosters, my direct ancestors. Since Becky is descended from other Mathews County Fosters who didn’t know if they were related to my Fosters, it looks like we now have proof that we are cousins.

However, Becky would be quick to note that we don’t have the actual documentary proof that would allow us to connect the dots. All we know is that this guy named Richard Foster (an earlier Richard Foster) came to the Virginia colony in 1635 from who knows where. In addition, a guy named Richard Foster, the same or yet another one, patented land on the Severn River in Gloucester. Several generations later, a guy named Richard Foster shows up in Gloucester’s Kingston Parish, now Mathews County. That’s all we know for sure. Yet “mythologies” on paper and online have my 5th great grandfather Richard Foster descended from Medieval peerage.

While I started out as a genealogy hobbyist, only dabbling in genealogy when the mood struck me, events and time have brought me to a new, safer place. I now practice self-control when genealogizing and posting to Ancestry.com or my blog. Yes, the older I get and the less life gets in the way, the more I have become addicted to genealogy. But now I spend more time pruning myths and adding documentary fertilizer to my growing family tree. I get more joy when moving beyond names and dates to puzzling together stories about my ancestors and the community and times in which they lived.

In 2019, thankfully before COVID, my husband and I traveled to England, Scotland, and Wales to visit the lands from whence my ancestors came. I was making inferences based on records that were hundreds of years old and my DNA estimates. I took the well-documented and the reasonable assumptions in hand and made an itinerary. 

In two weeks, we traveled in a 1,500-mile circle. We began by taking the Great Road North. The Virginia Armisteads hail from Kirk Deighton (left), so we went there. The Forsters (Fosters) of Bamburgh in Northumberland have been “claimed” by descendants of the Virginia Fosters, so we went there. When I arrived at the Castle, the guides could see me coming: yet another American who wanted to claim them. Never fear, I told the well-informed docent. I had read Dorothy Forster and The Steel Bonnets. She was relieved. I went to Scotland, visiting some sites where the border reivers roamed. My DNA says I am more than one-third Scottish, but I don’t know which ancestors in particular the DNA sprang from. My sister and her sons are redheads, so it makes sense. 

I visited Kirkby Lonsdale, a sweet little market town where Thomas and Susan Garnett were born and wed before they came to Jamestown.  I don’t have any documentation to say we’re related, mind you, but my ancestors were very likely of their sort. I went to towns in Mid Wales. Before my trip, a genealogist from the Powys Archives kindly informed me of towns in Wales with the most Lewises, Evanses, and Webbs. The graveyards were filled with names that made me blink twice. The names! I thought I was back in Mathews. Wales was hauntingly familiar. 

We rounded back into England via Gloucester and Bristol, towns from which many of my ancestors must have said goodbye to the Old World. I imagined them sailing down the Severn River past Milford Haven. Familiar names, familiar territory, indeed.

This post was inspired by Becky’s posts to the Mathews Genealogy and History page on Facebook where she discusses errors in the Daily Press column on the Hudgins Family I mentioned above. Thank you for your hard work and admonitions, Becky. I had poked around the Hudgins mythology several times and could never make it work, so pruned it well before my trip to the UK. Your systematic refutations should be part of a booklet of Mathews Mythologies, one that also includes the Foster tales.    

World War I Veterans

Tucked in the briery woods off of Hick’s Wharf Road, a dozen or so gravestones stand as testament to the lives of my third great grandparents, Richard (1785-1851) and Pricilla (1786-1850) Foster, and others. The small graveyard on land once part of their plantation, spanning a few hundred acres, is today surrounded by private property. On a visit to the graveyard last summer, to show the family plot to a couple of North Carolina cousins, I stopped to ponder some nearby graves I had never paid attention to before: the 20th-century graves of people who were quite possibly the descendants of enslaved people who worked for the Fosters.

I was particularly intrigued by the marker for John Harvey Ruff (29 May 1895 – 23 Jan 1955) of Bohannon, who had served as a private in Company D of the 367th Infantry during World War I. He was my paternal grandfather’s contemporary: Frank Raymond Lewis, Sr. (22 November 1894 – 11 December 1959) of Hudgins was also a veteran of the First World War. They both spent the best part of a year of their lives on the Western Front. 

According to his records, Papa enlisted in the U.S. Army’s Coast Artillery Corps on 2 May 1917, a month before men between the ages of 21 and 30 were required to register for the draft. He was overseas from 22 March 1918 to 16 March 1919, leaving with Battery F of the 54th CAC, which reorganized several times while on the Western Front. When he was part of the 44th Artillery, the Americans used British 8-inch Howitzers as their weapon.  He fought in the Battle of Saint Mihiel, the first U.S. led offensive of World War I, and in the Lorraine Sector.

I looked up John Ruff’s group and found that the 367th Infantry was part of Pershing’s American ExpeditionaryForce on the Western Front too. He and Papa were within a few miles of one another while their units moved around Alsace-Lorraine. The 367th Infantry, 92nd Division, shipped out in early June 1918 and came back in March 1919. The 92nd (Buffalo Soldiers)  and 93rd (Blue Helmets) Divisions were the only African American troops involved in World War I, and when the 92nd arrived in France, Pershing assigned them to fight under French commanders. The Division engaged in 67 days of battle in three major sectors against the Germans: St. Die (28 days), Meuse-Argonne  (7 days), and Marbache (32 days).

Within a few months following the Armistice, both men were sent to Camp Meade, Maryland, for demobilization. They were two Mathews men among two million Americans to enter the war that had broken out in 1914, about which America had wished to remain neutral. In Mathews County,Virginia: Lost Landscapes, Untold Stories, I learned that 33 Mathews men joined the military within four weeks after the war began, although 620 were eligible. When the draft age was broadened to include men from 18 to 45 years of age in September 1918, 945 more Mathews men signed up for the draft.

Since military history is not the point of this blog, I have included lots of links above for those who want to know more. Quite frankly, my lack of military knowledge has stopped me from posting sooner. I looked at plenty of websites and watched a few movies too. They reinforced my feelings of sadness about the horrors of war and what it must do to soldiers. 

I don’t know if his service led my grandfather to take his own life years later, but I imagine that firing Howitzers from muddy trenches didn’t help. John Ruff never married. He worked as an oysterman and in the seafood industry until his death from heart disease. He also lived a long time after his service, but I imagine time spent in those muddy trenches could have contributed to unhappiness for him, too. Of course, as a Black man, Ruff came home to contend with the terror of the Jim Crow South. Martha McCartney’s book reports that many blacks left the county after the war. This makes me remember riding in the car with my family in the late 1950s or early 1960s, passing a KKK gathering in a Mathews field. A bonfire or cross burning was lighting up the night sky.

In 1891, a son of Richard and Priscilla Foster (and several times great uncle of mine), Daniel Hall Foster Sr. (1824-1894), sold land from the Foster estate, over which he was the administrator, to Nancy Ruff and children. There were nine children, according to the 1880 census, and she would have been John Ruff’s grandmother. Cornelius Ruff (born about 1860) and Sallie B. Ransom (born about 1865) were John’s parents. I don’t know if Nancy Ruff’s property is now the land around the graveyard where Richard, Priscilla and John were laid to rest, but it does currently belong to a member of the Ruff family, according to the Mathews County GIS system. While some members of the Ruff family still live in the Bohannon area, several of the Ruff clan, including John, moved to Phoebus and worked in the seafood business there. On the website FindaGrave.com, the family plot is referenced as the Ruff-Foster graveyard.

Most interesting to me in the census records is that fact that the Ruffs are classified as Mulattoes, or persons of mixed Black and White ancestry, in the 19th century census records. By 1900, the racial classification “Mulatto” disappears and individuals are deemed either Black or White. I wonder if the Ruffs are my Black cousins too.

I wondered one more thing during my preparation to write this post: how about the rest of my Mathews family? Were there other World War I veterans? Even though the war was unpopular at first, nearly all men between the ages of 18 and 45 registered during the years the draft was implemented, about 23% of the U.S. population.

Of my Foster uncles who lived in the Bohannon area, only three were of draft age and only one, the youngest and single brother, served: Alonzo Finch Foster (1988-1952). He was in the Navy, and their most significant contribution to the war was to transport two million U.S. soldiers to Europe. By the summer of 1918, about 10,000 troops per day were arriving in France. The overwhelming numbers of troops that kept coming are believed to be the reason why the German High Command realized they could not win the war and agreed to the Armistice. McCartney wrote, "When Virginia's governor Henry C. Stuart called for recruits for the navy, six Mathews men, all experienced seamen and navigators, enlisted for patrol duty." Perhaps Uncle Lonnie was one of the six, and he certainly hailed from a seagoing family. But he did not continue the seafaring life: he became an accountant in the D.C. area and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

My Grandpa Jones and two of his brothers, all of North, registered for the draft as required. None were called up. Grandpa was the youngest, but he was married with one child and asked for an exemption. All of the Jones men were farmers and the sole means of support for their families. A result of the war and twentieth-century progress was that farming would change, so many self-sufficient farms like theirs would disappear, and more people would leave Mathews County.

None of my Papa Lewis’s brothers were called up either. In their case, those brothers who were eligible were lighthouse keepers, so were already doing their bit to watch for German U-boats.

I also looked for other Ruffs who registered for the draft, and there were three. However, neither of them was called up, as far as I can tell. John was the only person with the surname Ruff in the 92nd division. Again, all of the other Ruff men were sole supporters of their families. I believe that two of the three were John’s older brothers.

Papa and John Ruff were single and childless at the time they enlisted and registered for the World War I. And so they went abroad. While their experience as men of different races was real, their experiences as men in such a dangerous place were similar to the others of the two million American men on the Western Front. They both experienced Alsace-Lorraine, a place I’d love to visit someday to reflect on them. If you click on nothing else in this post, take a minute to look at these stunning and moving photographs of the fading battlefields of World War I. I am speechless to say how many ways these soldiers lives and ours are changed by the “War to End All Wars” and the ripples it sent through time. 

Cousin Shep Miller

After writing the previous blog post, about my Black cousins, I remembered a book sent to me by a seventh cousin in my Foster line of descent. This Foster cousin and I met years ago when involved in a DNA genealogy project to link her Foster clan to mine. She sent the book to me as a thank-you gift for convincing a male Foster cousin on my side to offer up his spit to Family Tree DNA for analysis. The book is an edited compilation of interviews conducted during the Great Depression, 1937 to 1939, by the Federal Writers’ Project to capture the testimonies of formerly enslaved people. She told me the tiny volume, We Lived in a Little Cabin in the Yard, included a story about a shared relative, Shepard Gabriel Miller (1808-1868), a several times great uncle of hers. The DNA confirmed paper genealogies, making Shep my second cousin, five times removed. Isn’t genealogy fun? 

I recalled that the story suggested cousin Shep had sexually abused his slaves. Although it was disturbing at the time, I didn’t know what to do or how to feel about it. Now, in these times of awakening White people like me getting in touch with Black cousins, the family story takes on new significance. 

So, last week I re-read the story and spent some time digesting it. While it painfully came to life in my mind, I set about making the characters in the story jibe with the limited research I’d done on this distant branch of my family tree. I had two Shepard Millers, so which one? Beyond that, I considered what the story said, about where and how they lived. What would census and slave schedule records tell me? 

I had questions about details in the edited interview, and I found the original transcript of it in the Library of Congress’s digital collections. While I discovered that the editor had rearranged the text she hadn't altered the details. She had also, thankfully, replaced the interviewer’s attempt to write in dialect. In neither version does Elizabeth Sparks, the interviewee, talk about Shep Miller right away, so I had trouble figuring out how her mistress was connected to him. In my quotations below, I’ve used the original transcript while, like the interviewer, replacing words captured as dialect. 

After a few introductory greetings and statements of reluctance – “You want me to tell you about slavery days . . . It’s all past now, so I say let her rest. It’s too awful to tell anyway. You’re too young to know all that talk.” – Elizabeth begins her story. 

“My mistress’s name was Miss Jennie Brown . . . she died about four years ago. Bless her. She was a good woman. Of course, I mean she’d slap and beat you once in a while, but she wasn’t a woman for fighting, fussing, and beating you all day like some I know. She was too young when the war ended for that. Of course, no white folks are perfect. Her parents were a little rough. What’s that? Can I tell you about her parents? . . . No sense for you to know about all those mean white folks. They’re all dead now. They meant good, I reckon.” 

They meant good? Elizabeth Sparks was a brave woman, talking to a white man who wanted to write down her stories. She swings back and forth – “good woman” to “mean white folks” – and the reader can sense her conflict. She has strong feelings, but does she dare to speak the truth? 

“Shep Miller was my master. His old father, he was a tough one. Lord! I’ve seen him kill them. He’d get the meanest overseers to put over them . . . he was a clerk and was he tough. Sometimes he beat them until they couldn’t work . . . Beat women just like men. Beat women naked and wash them down in brine.” Elizabeth lets the accounts roll out for a few more anguishing paragraphs. Oh, how the memories must have hurt her. But thank goodness for this record, one of a few that tells us the painful truth about our “gallant” White ancestors. We need to know these stories, to feel the pain, too, for thus began systemic racism. 

She continues, “They worked six days from sun to sun . . . Usual work day began when the horn blew and stopped when the horn blew. The got off just long enough to eat at noon. Didn’t have much. They got some suet and a slice of bread for breakfast . . . For dinner they’d eat ash cake baked on the blade of a hoe.” 

And who were these people, her mistress Miss Jennie Brown, her master Shep Miller, and his old father. Who was the clerk? I puzzled through the documents to see if one of my Shep Millers might have been married to Jennie Brown, when I noticed that the eldest daughter of Shepard G. Miller, Sr. was Virginia Cary Miller (1834-1931), who married Andrew C. Brown (1821-Bef. 1900) on 18 October 1860. Jennie must have been Virginia’s nickname and this was seconded by the 1900 census, where she is listed as Jennie C. Brown. 

Shepard G. Miller, Sr., was Mathews Clerk of Court and a farmer. His parents were Gabriel Miller (1766-1845) and Elizabeth “Betsy” Foster (1773-1846), my Foster connection. 

“I lived at Seaford then . . . Shep Miller lived at Springdale.” 

There is a Seaford Lane a little south of the village of Hudgins in Mathews. By looking at the census records, which list Andrew and Jennie Brown living in the Piankatank District, which includes the village of Hudgins, it may be concluded that Seaford Lane was the location of their home. I've asked a genealogist friend to confirm this. A view on Google Maps shows a short, straight Seaford Lane ending in a circle in front of a large house on Stutts Creek. 

It took me a while to puzzle over Springdale, a property listed on the National Register of Historic Places and owned by William Shultice from about 1832 to 1868. The property is located on the East River, just south of Mathews Court House. The 1860 census shows the Shultice family living next door to the Shep Miller family. I looked at an architectural survey for names of nearby historic properties listed in the Virginia Department of Historic Resources database and found Spring Hill located right next door. A few Google searches on alternate combinations and spellings of Spring Hill and Shepard Miller landed me on a 29 July 2020 reprint in the Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal that solved any remaining questions. Elizabeth Sparks had remembered the grand Springdale name, but not the less well-known Spring Hill. 

“100 Years Ago, Thursday, July 28, 1910 from the Mathews Journal: A fine bungalow is being erected at ‘Spring Hill,’ the farm of Mr. S.G. Miller, which when completed will be the headquarters of the Riverside Yacht and Tennis Club . . . “ 

This S.G. Miller, Jr. (1848-1932) was the son of Shep Miller, Sr. and his wife, Emory James (1816-1891). Shep Jr.’s sister was Virginia “Jennie” Cary Miller Brown. 

Shep Miller’s Spring Hill real estate was valued at $30,000 and he owned $44,000 in personal property. He owned 43 people, including several young females. Elizabeth was certainly one of them. Jennie and Andrew Brown were married in 1860, and Shepard Miller, Sr. gave the then-enslaved Elizabeth to his daughter Jennie to take with her to Seaford, located about 5 miles away. 

Before his October marriage, Andrew Brown is captured by the census as owning 21 slaves and living on real estate valued at $20,000 with personal property also valued at $20,000. Of Jennie, Elizabeth said, “She didn’t beat. She was just a young thing. Course she took a whack at me sometimes, but that was nothing. Her mother was a mean old thing.” 

Jennie’s mother, Shep’s wife, was Emory James Miller. “She used to make my aunt Caroline knit all day and when she got so tired after dark that she’d get sleepy, she’d make her stand up and knit. She worked her so hard that she’d go to sleep standing up and every time her head nodded and her knees sag, the lady would come down across her head with a switch. That was Miss Jennie’s mother. She’d give the cook just so much meal to make bread . . . Beat the devil out of her if she burned that bread.” 

Elizabeth was glad to leave the Miller home. “I went with Miss Jennie and worked at house. I didn’t have to cook.” She said she slept on the floor in Jennie’s room, on and old rug in front of the fireplace. “I got permission to get married.” Her husband-to-be was lived on the plantation next to the Browns. In 1860, the family of Lewis M. Hudgins, also a maternal ancestor of mine, lived next door, so Hudgins may have been John Sparks’s master. 

“You always had to get permission. White folks would give you away. You jump across a broom stick together and you were married.” 

After the Civil War, in 1870, the Brown household was made up of Andrew, Jennie, and two children as well as a cook, Ellen Smith, noted as Black. The period census records often include Black individuals in White-owned households. They are listed as cooks, domestic servants, laborers, and the like. 

Elizabeth isn’t listed in the Brown household. She and John moved into a home of their own. By 1870, the census shows them having real estate valued at $300 and personal property valued at $100. They had six children, aged eight and under. John Sparks was identified as a Black oysterman. 

Elizabeth was described as “keeping house” and her race, as well as that of the six children, was entered as "M" for Mulatto. They lived in the Westville District of Mathews, the county’s municipal center. 

Mulatto. Was Elizabeth a child of old Shep Miller? Elizabeth’s mother “lived in a big one room log house with an upstairs.” Was she a favorite? Elizabeth knew about others and suggested why they were known as such. “Old Massa done so much wrongness I couldn’t tell you all of it. Slave girl Betty Lilly always had good clothes and all the privileges. She was a favorite of his.” 

Elizabeth remembered the war. “Shep went to war but not for long. We didn’t see none of it, but the slaves knew what the war was about. After the war they tried to fool the slaves about freedom and wanted to keep them working, but the Yankees told them they were free.” She recounted that some slave owners tried to send their slave to South Carolina to keep the Yankees from getting to them. The Yankees “were taking all the livestock and all the men slaves back to Norfolk with them to break up the system . . . the Yankees were giving everything to the slaves.” 

Soldiers were taking the Brown’s possessions and Jennie’s clothes, giving them to the slaves. They offered some to Elizabeth. “I didn’t take them though because she’d been pretty nice to me.” They tried to take her John, but he pretended to be too lame to walk. “I can hear Miss Jennie now yelling at them Yankees. No! Who are you to judge? I’ll be the judge. If John Sparks wants to stay here, he’ll stay.” The Sparks’s baby started to cry. “So, one of them said that as long as he had a wife and a baby that young, he guessed he could stay. They took all the horses, cows, pigs, chickens, and anything they could use and left . . . I was married in 1861, my oldest boy was born in 1862, and the falling of Richmond came in 1865.” 

The Civil War was financially hard on the Browns. In the 1870 census, their real estate, ten years earlier valued at $20,000, was now valued at $2,500 and personal estate, once valued at $20,000, was now worth only $500. 

Elizabeth closed the interview. “Now you take that and go. Put that in the book.” 

Thank you, Elizabeth, for bringing the thorny times of our ancestors to life.

My Black Cousins

Ancestry estimated my ethnicity and told me I had more than
a thousand 4th cousins or closer relatives who had also
sent DNA samples for analysis by them. 

About two years ago, in preparation for a trip to the UK, I sent a sample of spit to Ancestry to confirm or deny my paper genealogical findings. Unsurprisingly, I had few documented leads on the exact origin of my British ancestors because most came to Virginia so early. Of the people who represented the dead ends of my dozens of lines of descent, 25 percent of them first appeared in 17th century Virginia, 50 percent were traced to 18th-century beginnings in Virginia or North Carolina, and the rest could be traced no farther back than the first half of the 19th century. All of my direct lines stayed in Tidewater, Virginia, mostly in Gloucester’s Kingston Parish, which became Mathews County in 1791. Some settled first in Mathews or New Kent, Virginia, then migrated to old Bute County (later Granville, Warren, Franklin Counties), North Carolina. Some siblings and cousins moved on from there, but for the most part, my ancestors have hung close to the Eastern Seaboard.

For more on early
English settlement,
I suggest reading
Adapting to the New
World: English
Society in the
17th-Century
Chesapeake.

Their demographic mix probably mimics the outline of colonial Virginia settlement, with about three-fourths arriving as indentured servants, simply hoping to find a better life, and the other fourth representing the lesser gentry, those with some education and means, but no land in the Mother Country. After digesting research from scholarly publication like Adapting to the New World, I felt pretty safe in the assumption that many of my paternal ancestors came from Wales and the English Border counties via the Severn River valley on ships leaving Bristol. 

Bamburgh Castle is like Mecca to genealogically-
inclined members of the Foster Family
A sign near the Castle entrance sets us
straight on the Foster/Forster
relation to the estate.

On my mother’s side, there is a long-standing legend that my maternal grandmother's  Foster family was descended from Northumberland, England, and that one particularly notorious ancestor was a 16th-century constable, Border Riever, and caretaker of Bamburgh Castle. Others who have an English origin story are said to have been born in Kirkby Lonsdale, Kirk Deighton, other Yorkshire locations, and Kent. Many of these ancestors probably left from London or port cities on England’s southern coast. 

For the most part, Ancestry’s DNA test suggested there was some truth to these folklores. Nevertheless, I am nearly 100 percent British.

Recently, I received an email from Ancestry telling me that their analysis of my DNA had been refined since the ever-increasing pool of people tested had provided more data. The updated ethnicity estimate, based on more than 44,000 reference samples, told me my ancestors were from Scotland (36%), England and Northwestern Europe (34%), Wales (16%), Germanic Europe (10%), and Ireland (4%). 

All this leads to the point of this posting: the discovery of new-to-me cousins. The Ancestry DNA test provides more than your ethnicity results. They also provide a list of DNA relatives who have also taken this test, sorted by their degree of relation to you, revealed in lengths of identically-patterned DNA. Some of these people you may know and some you don’t. Some have kindly added their photograph, but most have not. Some have identified themselves with their name, but most provide only an email address. Some have linked their extensive and well-documented Ancestry family trees, but they are truly few and far between.

  

Ancestry gives you a list of your DNA
matches as well as a number of ways to explore the
data. You can even contact your cousins who have
given their permission to be contacted.

My son has taken this test and Ancestry correctly identified our relationship as parent/child. Neither my sister, nephews, nor any of my first cousins have been tested, so the next relatives identified by Ancestry are my 2nd cousins. Apparently, eight of them have been tested and from details they provide I can identify all but two of them.

I discovered that the list of cousins grows from here, and I was curious to find others I knew. Besides, the Ancestry email caught me on a particularly slow COVID-defined day. Leisurely scrolling along, I found twenty of my 3rd cousins had been tested. Although there were several familiar family names, I didn’t know a single one.

Nevertheless, I scrolled on to 4th cousins. At last I saw a name I recognized. My cousin Grover Lewis had been tested. I was still counting cousins, although I was about to give up the extra effort of counting as the list seemed endless, when . . . 99, 100, 101, 102. Huh? Hmm. 103, 104, 105. What? I scrolled back to 102 and looked at her photo and then clicked through to her ethnicity estimate. I scrolled on to 105 and looked at his. Both were a bit Scottish and English. Other European locales showed up, but the majority of their DNA patterns, 60 to 80 percent of them, were related to Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo, Western Bantu, Benin, Togo, and Mali ethnicities.

Scroll, scroll, scroll. Faster now, I was just looking at the photos. After about a half hour, I scrolled past more than 1,000 of my DNA-defined 4th cousins and among them I found 25 African-Americans who had identified themselves as such by adding their photo. There may have been more, but as I said, not everyone submits a photo and clicking through on over 1,000 people to drill down to their ethnicity percentages required more time that I was willing to spend. 

By now it was clear to me that I had found a truth that most of us White people know, on an intuitive level, but have never confronted as fact: great-great grandfather, or his brother, or someone else not too far removed from me, raped the people he enslaved.

At first, I was in some form of denial. I though the “White man in the woodpile” had to be my North Carolina great-great. After all, he was the largest slaveholder of the slaveholding bunch of great-great grandfathers and uncles. Could I somehow determine this?

In fits and starts over the last couple of weeks, I have gathered my 25 new-found cousins onto a spreadsheet and started comparing them. I grouped them by the number of centimorgans (cM), the length of a piece of matched DNA, that I shared with each. I graphed their ethnicity percentages from European and African geographical origins.

I discovered that not all 4th cousins are the same. Ancestry lets you click on a cousin to group them with others who share the same ancestor. These shared DNA groups are designated by a length of DNA exhibiting the same pattern. 

For example, my closest Black cousins, Mercedes and Jonathan, share the same 35-cM-long pattern of DNA with me, so we all descend from the same ancestor. So do six other people culled by Ancestry from the list of more than 1,000 4th cousins and sorted into this DNA pattern group. 

Pamela, Edwin, and I share a DNA pattern 23 cM in length with 19 other 4th cousins and one 3rd cousin. 

Alexis, Charlene and I share a different 23 cM long pattern with six other people. 

Jon, me, and 27 other people, including my son, share yet another identical 23 cM DNA pattern. 

Jamaal, Jean, four other cousins, and I share the same 20-cM long pattern. 

Many of my new-found Black cousins share a length of DNA with me, yet they share no patterns or ancestors with any other Black cousin in my group of 25. 

All of this suggests more than one of my White ancestors was an abusive master. There wasn’t just one “White man in the woodpile.”

So far, I have tried to triangulate to figure out who the shared ancestor is in the grouping of nine people that includes Mercedes, Jonathan, and I. By examining the genealogies linked by some White cousins in the group, I tried to see if I share a common ancestor with them. Examination of a Mathews County, Virginia, cousin's family tree shows we are related through the children of Henry Digges (1767-1823), but it’s complicated: my third great uncle married Henry's granddaughter. 

In another triangulation, I found a White cousin in the group with Pamela, Edwin, and I who has a number of Mathew’s ancestors with the Forrest surname. My paternal grandmother was a Forrest, and there are Forrests in other paternal and maternal branches of my family tree. But I can’t make a connection. Also, I learned while preparing for my UK trip that Forrests, Forsters, and Fosters, a surname spelled variously once people started writing and recording names, can be related. I've got Fosters on my maternal side. 

I've surfed through other groupings for relations. The same surnames pop out, but no direct line yet. My assumption that one North Carolinian was to “blame” seems to be misdirected. My Mathews, Virginia, ancestors are implicated by my work thus far. 

Importantly, what this shows me, and I am saddened and ashamed to realize, is that the sexual abuse of female enslaved people was all too common. This realization, that most American Blacks have White ancestors, has already resulted in my viewing every Black person I see in a different light. If he’s not my cousin, then he is very likely the cousin of my White next-door neighbor, business colleague, or friend from church.  

Spencer Hall: He Died in the Guinea Trade

 

A distant cousin of mine, Conrad Hall, recently published a book about the descendants of our fifth-great-grandparents, A Select History of Mathews County, Virginia: 17th, 18th & 19th Centuries and The Family of Robert and Ann Hall. It's a very well-compiled and well-written historical documentation, full of evidence surrounding the origin, environment, and events of their lives. I can hardly read a paragraph without adding a fact or two about one of our common ancestors to my Ancestry database.  

While reading my cousin's book, I have discovered another slaver to confess: my fourth great uncle Spencer Hall (1760-1793). His sister, Ann or "Nanny" (1756-1820), and her husband, Peter Foster (1757-1819), are my fourth great grandparents. Peter, Spencer, and another Hall brother, Robert, served together on the Henry during the Revolutionary War in defense of the Mobjack and Chesapeake Bay coasts of Mathews, where British ships were frighteningly visible to area residents. Shallow-draft galleys like the Henry were a force developed to defend the homeland from British sailors who might come ashore to forage for food and supplies. Peter was on board as a ship carpenter, but the Hall boys were seamen who would eventually be transferred to a larger Virginia Navy ship, the Tartar. 

In his book, Cousin Conrad posits that after the American Revolution, Spencer may have signed on with a merchant vessel or privateer with a home port of Salem or Beverly, Massachusetts, since he married Mary Ober in 1781, the daughter of a Salem, Massachusetts, mariner. The extended Ober family was prominent in Massachusetts-based maritime pursuits and Conrad mentions seven Obers who held important crew positions on ships between 1777 and 1781. 

Soon after they were married, Spencer and Mary Hall had two children, although both died young. Later they had three more sons, Spencer, Jr. (1787), Israel (1790), and James Levette (1793). Spencer was often at sea, enjoying good commercial success in his ventures. By 1786, he was partial owner of the schooner Polly, but in December of that year it was badly damaged when driven onto a Barnstable, Massachusetts, beach by an Atlantic gale. The vessel and cargo were put up at auction, as advertised in the Essex Register on March 26, 1787. In 1790, he and a partner registered the Mary Ann. Likewise, it was lost with its cargo, this time in the "graveyard of the Atlantic," off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. On August 30, 1790, the Essex Register shipping news lists him as captain of the Mary, returning from Spain. 

Later that year he bought the 82-ton schooner, Union. "The record is silent on the Unon's activities in the first two years of his ownership, but in 1792 Spencer became involved in the slave trade," states Conrad Hall. "Perhaps he succumbed to it out of desperation. He did have significant debts . . . and a successful voyage involving the slave trade was typically highly profitable. It would have been an option since his home port, Salem, was deeply involved in the slave trade, as were other New England ports." 

Spencer Hall may have been involved at first in the South Carolina aspect of the trade, where slaves from the Rice Coast of Africa, were preferred for their particular agricultural experience, since he wrote his will in Charleston in September 1792. Before embarking on his first African voyage, he may have realized the risk of the slave trade over his previous maritime ventures. By November, he left the West Coast of Africa with 94 enslaved people and arrived back with a cargo of 77. He quickly headed back to Africa on the Union, but died sometime before the ship arrived. Hall quotes the Governor of Sierra Leone, as taken from Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America:  

"The schooner Union of Salem in New England. When she arrived on the Coast she was commanded by one Hall who dying at Bance [Bunce] Island, was succeeded in the Command by his Mate. She took on board a Cargo of Slaves from Rio Nunez [in Guinea] with which she left the Coast bound to the West Indies, or Surinam [on the northeast coast of South America] about the latter end of October last . . ."

 Among the risks he faced on an African voyage were the deadly diseases yellow fever, malaria, and small pox. He, like many others, probably succumbed to one of these. There are supposed to be large numbers of slavers' graves on Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone River, where trading ships stopped, due to the depth of the channel, and took on their cargo of humans, as had been the case from the 17th century. 

Unitarian minister and pastor of the East Church in Salem, William Bentley, noted in his diary that "Capt. Spence Hall died in the Guinea Trade," as the slave trade was known. "He has left a wife and six children, belonging to the English church in this town. He has been an unfortunate man, & thus sought 'base means for his redress.'" Bentley's comments suggest he had to take on the high-risk venture to meet his family obligations and "unfortunate" financial situation. Although he lost his life, Spencer must have benefited from the profits of his slave trading ventures, for his wife and children appear to have lived comfortably thereafter. 

Back in Mathews, little is known about brother Robert. He may have continued in a maritime career, was probably unmarried, and died by 1847. His bounty land, awarded for service in the Revolutionary War, was claimed for the benefit of the family by brother Thomas Hall. 

Thomas married his neighbor, Mary Gayle, and lived a long life as a shipbuilder on the East River. Mary's brother Mathias or Matthew Gayle was also a noteworthy Mathews shipbuilder. The 1820 US Census reveals that Thomas and Mary Hall counted 19 enslaved people as part of their household. 

Spencer's shipmate and my fourth great grandfather Peter Foster lived on Mathews' North River, west of the Halls. He also lived a long life and died in 1819. According to the 1810 US Census, he also counted 19 enslaved people in his and Nanny's household.  

Detail of the Mobjack Bay and Mathews from Fry, J., Jefferson, P. & Jefferys, T. (1755) A map of the most inhabited part of Virginia containing the whole province of Maryland with part of Pensilvania, New Jersey and North Carolina. [London, Thos. Jefferys] Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/74693166/

Her Real Name was Martha

My grandmother, Laura Belle Foster (1890-1976), thought the world of her little brother, my Uncle Howitt (Howitt Hodge Foster, M.D., 1893-1980). He was the last child of great grandfather Henry Howitt Foster (1851-1930), who had eight children with his first wife, Madeline Debnam (1850-1885), and three with his second wife and my great grandmother, Belle Catherine Hodge (1863-1893). You may have noticed that Great Grandmother Belle died in the year Uncle Howitt was born. Since his father, Henry, was 42 years old with ten other children to feed and a business to run in Mathews, Virginia, baby Howitt was sent to live with Belle’s parents in Wake County, North Carolina. There Howitt grew up with his grandparents and then his Aunt Fannie. He became a doctor like Fannie’s husband John Smith, and practiced family medicine in Norlina, North Carolina, for the rest of his life.

Like my grandmother, my mother, Mary Belle Jones Lewis (1923-2016) loved Uncle Howitt. His daughters, Priscilla and Laura Belle, were her favorite cousins and treasured life-long friends. Like me, Mom loved family history and collected many items that are now part of my genealogy collection. Mixed in with papers sent to her by Priscilla, I found a photocopy of a picture of Martha.

On the back of the photo of Martha, Uncle Howitt wrote, “I called her my ‘colored mamy’ as did rest of family and she was treated as one of us as long as she lived. She had her own room and own things which were furnished by my grandpa and grandma.”

The thought of this makes me feel uncomfortable. The way my family swept formerly enslaved people into their households as servants who worked without agency was not unusual for the time. Yet I still feel uneasy and awkward about how to reconcile this past, let alone do something about it. Although I wasn’t raised by a Black woman, I have friends and relatives my age (ahem, 65) who were. And there were plenty of people descended from those who were formerly enslaved who did the cleaning, cooking, and yard and farm work at our house in Gloucester and my grandparents’ home in Mathews. I have a history of white privilege that I have known for a long time, but like so many others, current events are calling me to look and think about racism anew.

An article in the New York Times, Overlooked No More: Nancy Green, the ‘Real Aunt Jemima,’ says that the Aunt Jemima logo is an outgrowth of Old South plantation nostalgia and romance. This may have rung true at the time of the Columbia Exhibition, but thank goodness most people today aren’t nostalgic for a “Gone with the Wind” past. As my mother would say by way of explanation, “it was just the way things were.” Accept it and get over it. But what white people are waking up to now is that such things as a syrup brand and a statue of Robert E. Lee are legacy items from that “just the way things were” time. We cannot just get over it. They are hurtful to some and harmful to us all as we move our diverse society forward. Aunt Jemima was a brand. Nancy Green was a real person. She had a job, was a church missionary, had a family, and died in a car crash in 1923. The United Daughters of the Confederacy tried to erect a monument to “faithful colored mammies” on her grave, but the measure was not approved. Thank goodness. One less monument to tear down today.

The New York Times article which gives agency to Nancy Green references an earlier article by Riche Richardson, an associate professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center at CornellUniversity. She writes that the Aunt Jemima logo is “grounded in an idea about the ‘mammy,’ a devoted and submissive servant who eagerly nurtured the children of her white master and mistress while neglecting her own. Visually, the plantation myth portrayed her as an asexual, plump black woman wearing a headscarf.”

Yes, just like Uncle Howitt’s Martha. In his inscription, he said that Martha was “a woman born into slavery” and who was owned by his 1^st and my 3rd great grandparents, Thomas Richard Debnam (1806-1883) and Pricilla Macon (1812-1878). The 1860 US Federal Census Slave Schedule lists them as the enslavers of 52 people in Wake County, North Carolina. They gave Martha to their daughter, my 2^nd great grandmother, Arabella Catherine Debnam (1837-1900), who married Alonzo Ross Hodge (1835-1910), in 1858 and lived at Marks Creek, Wake County, about ten miles east of Raleigh, North Carolina. Uncle Howitt wrote that Martha helped raise Alonzo and Arabella’s children: Alonzo Richard Hodge, Priscilla, Fannie, Aurelia, and Belle. “Martha outlived grandpa and grandma, although she had attacks of asthma when I was a small boy and then went to live with my uncle Alonzo Richard Hodge until she died in her late eighties.” In the 1870 US Federal Census, Martha is listed as a 35-year-old black domestic servant in the household of AR and Arabella Hodge.

Martha died between 1920 and 1925. I don’t know if she had a husband or children. The only documentation credits her with no life of her own. I have walked around graveyards in Wake, Franklin, Granville, and Warren counties looking for ancestors. I never thought to look for Martha and I wonder if she’s buried with her white family.  

Probably not.  

Update on Alexander Hudgins

I mentioned the Slave Wrecks Project in my last post, Reshaping the Narrative: Alexander R. Hudgins. After posting, I decided to take a stab at contacting someone with the Project to see if they might have heard of the Brig Ann. I was delighted to hear back from Steve Lubkemann the very next morning! He and an associate filled out the story.

"Quelimane was the largest source of slaves from Mozambique (then Portuguese East Africa) because it was at the mouth of the Zambezi river," said Steve, "in essence a highway into the deep interior where most of the enslaving took place." He explained that maritime archaeology is not done in the waters off of Quelimane itself because the Zambezi delta is a very challenging dive location with treacherous water, bull sharks, and 20 foot long crocs! They dive in other locations on the coast such as Mozambique Island, Inhambane,and Maputo (Delagoa Bay), and have folks involved in various levels of archival work on the whole coast. 

Steve put me in touch with Kate McMahon, an archivist at NMAAHC who has insight into a variety of lines of the project research. And yes indeed, the Brig Ann is in her database of American slave ships operating in Brazil. According to Kate, during the 1840s, a man named George William Gordon of Massachusetts was the consul at Rio de Janeiro. Gordon was an abolitionist whig who called out Americans participating in the illegal foreign slave trade. He watched and created lists of these American ships, slave traders, and the merchant firms that consigned them in Rio, as well as information about the captains and crews. 

Kate found the Brig Ann in Gordon's list: “To Africa yr ending 12/31/1842” and “arrivals at Rio year ending 12/31/1843”. The Ann actually departed Rio on November 24, 1842 under the consignment of the American merchant firm Maxwell, Wright & Co., for the merchant Manoel Pinto da Fonseca. He was the most active and wealthiest slave trader in Rio and, in fact, all of Brazil. This fact alone means that the Brig Ann was almost certainly a slave ship. "He essentially had almost a monopoly on the illegal slave trade to Mozambique during the 1840s, and was hiring dozens of American vessels per year to transport tens of thousands of enslaved people to his plantation and auction facility in Ponta do Caju, southwest of Rio," said Kate. "Fonseca’s only businesses were slave trading and sugar production using enslaved labor."

But did the ship wreck? Looking at the dates, probably not. "It appears the Ann did not wreck during this trip to Mozambique and successfully landed a cargo of enslaved people in Brazil in July 1843, if this is the same vessel, which given the timing seems very likely." Kate thinks that Uncle Alexander was a crew member and a regular sailor, not an officer, given his age. He must have died "At Quilliman" in Mozambique, like the death announcement says. I was wrong to assume a ship wreck. "During this time, there were massive outbreaks of yellow fever ravaging different parts of Africa and Brazil, directly tied to the transmission of diseases by slave ships," said Kate. So this may have been the cause of death.

Kate adds another important, albeit sad, note. "If your ancestor was a regular sailor, he may not have even known that the journey was a slave journey." She said crews were not often told they were going to Africa after Rio. A 6-month contract journey they thought they had signed on for would last a year or more. Kate concluded, "There are a lot of records of complaints by crews because of this and they actually make one of the richest sources for information about the operation of this trade."

As my research continues, I'll be looking for other links between Mathews men and this scheme.