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Over the past 7 years or so, as I have shared in some of the diaries I’ve written, I have been researching the genealogy of my family. One of the lessons I’ve learned is that it’s impossible to draw conclusions without valid documentation for corroboration. However, in the past few days, I have encountered an instance where a standard reading of available documentation has failed to reveal the full story of a member of my family. In the past few days, I have had to revise how I think about this kind of research.
This diary’s title is admittedly click-bait-ish. I already knew I had a Black cousin: A second cousin of mine married a Black woman, and they had a son. However, the birth of this young man occurred after the Civil Rights Movement and Loving, so everything was above board. The cousin referred to in the title is someone born in 1919 in a former slave state (Maryland). It appears that almost nothing was above board, and I have been shocked by some of the details. The roots of this discovery came from a more distant relation (half-second cousin once removed) that I found after learning that one of my Czech great-great-grandmothers had given birth to a son out of wedlock (in Bohemia) before marrying my great-great-grandfather. The new branch consists of the descendants of that son.
This son’s youngest daughter, born in 1894 in rural Maryland, became a live-in maid for a wealthy family in Baltimore, according to census data. In all the census records I found, only her maiden name appears, but nonetheless, other Ancestry trees noted that she had a husband and a daughter. Before accepting the existence of the husband and the daughter, I sought to find some document somewhere that showed the names of these three, or even just two of them. The census had already failed me in that regard, since the maid, mother of this daughter, was never listed with any family members after 1910. Her daughter, on the other hand, appeared to be living in boarding houses during her childhood. This was my first shock: Who would place their children, especially as infants, in a boarding house to be cared for by strangers?
I looked for a marriage record between the maid and her assumed husband, but all I could find was a record from Delaware where the name of the bride didn’t match the name of the maid. I looked for the birth record of their daughter, but the mother’s name in the index, again, was not the name of the maid (but different from the bride’s name on the marriage record). Finally, I found the daughter’s application to Social Security, which listed both of her parents’ names as they were known. The other big clue was that, under “Color” on the form, the daughter had checked “Negro.” She was Black, and, thus, so was her father, the maid’s husband. This explains why the couple got married in Delaware; Maryland’s miscegenation law was in effect, and remained so until the Supreme Court struck down all such laws in 1967.
This was when my doubts about the existence of this family began to fall away. The reason for inconsistent names was that the maid was attempting to hide all evidence of her marriage, including her daughter. Her family (i. e. my family) had already disowned her, according to an account I found attached to another tree, “for marrying a man of a different color.” On the other hand, her death certificate was signed by one of her sisters (a spinster who was one of the few woman trolly drivers in Baltimore), so there was at least one family member who had a little mercy. She was buried in a Catholic church cemetery in the rural community where she was born, under her married name, but it was not clear any of her family were in attendance, other than her sister.
What must this kind of childhood have been like for her daughter, my Black cousin, where she never experienced life in a normal family? I assume that her parents would find a boarding house where the proprietors (Black, of course) understood the problems the family faced, and would spend as much time with her as they could. But, still, most of the time, her parents would not have been around. Even the most sympathetic of boarding house proprietors could not provide the love and comfort that her parents ought to have. I doubt there was much happiness in her childhood. Over two marriages, she gave birth to three children. She died in 1961 at the age of 41.
It has been a revelation for me to see and understand the effect of racism on members of my own family, how it creates an unjust societal structure that makes living a normal life damned near impossible. Even though all I have is access to a few documents, it’s clear that no member of this family was left undamaged by racism. And yet there are those in the country who would just as soon return to the days of intrusive state laws that limit the freedoms of certain segments of society, that are no one else’s business. And it is already happening. They don’t care what damage they do.
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