When I first started researching my family's history, among my first sources were the federal census records. I'd find a name - "is the age right?" Yes, fantastic! "does the spouse's name match?" Yes, wonderful - I think we might just be in the right place. I'm getting excited. I see the names of the children listed below. "whoa, a minor with a different last name???" Well, that's interesting. Let me look into that. "Now, what's the occupation" Farmer, well, okay, dull but expected. I line up the page on the computer to make sure I follow the lines over - education, place of birth, places of father's birth, mother's birth, do you own or rent your home, etc.etc.
And then there was that question - number of slaves owned. The first families I traced beyond the civil war were Quakers, or Methodists who used to be Quakers, so naturally I was always confident the answer would be zero, and it always was. I was sure, however, that I could handle it if I found out they owned slaves. It was just the times, right?
Then researching a different branch of the family, this one based in Georgia, the day came when I followed the line over, and under "number of slaves owned", was written in firm black handwriting, "3".
Wait a minute. My family owned slaves? I had visions of a mother torn from her child, sold to another family. A young man beaten for not being properly subservient. My family did that? My family did that? I thought I could be clinical, detached, reasonable, in dealing with my family owning human beings.
How, as genealogists, do we deal with our family doing bad things? We're used to disagreeing with family members, but our own direct ancestors are special. They're our parents, our grandparents, our grandparents' moms and dads. As a progressive with roots in the civil rights battles of the 60's, to think of my ancestors being the ones owning slaves is painful. And personal.
I repeat my thought that they were part of their times, I shouldn't expect them to be like me, anymore than I would expect them to think that women were equal, or that people could build machines that fly.
In my last diary, I wrote about my grandfather saving a woman from being lynched for having the temerity to shoot a man who was trying to rape her. It was this grandfather (1882 - 1973) who, in a way, helped me deal with slavery-owning family, again with his jottings from the 1970's, as he looked back on his life.
He was a circuit-riding minister, riding a circuit of several churches over the course of a month, a week in each church. He had an old leather saddlebag that carried his Bible, his hand-written sermon, his lunch, and he'd sling over his mule, or put in the "tin lizzy" to go from church to church. One of the churches he served was Soul's Chapel in Leather's Ford, Georgia. This town was an offspring of the now-dead gold mining industry in North Georgia, and it was populated by a poor, rough set of people whose sole revenue came from selling illegal moonshine. And Methodist ministers were against drinking alcohol, and against breaking the law. So they were against the moonshiners of Leather's Ford.
My first real introduction to Leather's Ford came when one of my church officials pointed out a field that showed more stones than soil. He said to me, 'See that stony field? Every stone in it has been thrown at a man's head some time or other.'
When my grandfather first went to the church, the church sent members out to guard him from being shot, and save his car from having the tires slashed by the moonshine-making criminals who lived in the area.
Soul's Chapel, the church at Leather's Ford, was gruesome. The building was old and the roof leaked in many places. High powered guns had blasted half a dozen or more large bullet holes completely through each wall of the church. They had not held a church service for more than 3 months.
Prohibition came in 1920. These sturdy, rugged, mountain people had not voted for it; in fact, they did not know or understand that it had become law. All they saw and knew was that they had always made liquor and now there was a tremendous demand for liquor. There was hardly any limit to the price the drinkers would pay for illegal alcohol, and the mountain roads and people were ideally situated to take advantage of the opportunity for profit by this industry.
Prohibition, and the high prices people were willing to pay for illegal liquor, seemed like a god-send which would relieve them of their depressing poverty. It meant automobiles, gasoline, better clothes, food, education, civil rights, self-respect, and recognition. No wonder the people felt that the preacher who was seeking to destroy their long delayed deliverance from hardship and poverty was their enemy, and that any and everything they could do to protect their livelihood was justified. This issue was one of life and death proportions, for economically they were fighting for their lives.
My grandfather did not believe black people were equal. I know that, because I argued endlessly with him about it starting from when I was about 10, with him laughing at my nonsense, and me getting more and more furious at his laughing at an idea I was so passionately convinced was right. I'm sure his parents did not believe blacks were equal, nor their grandparents.
But in reading of his compete empathy for these poor rough moonshiners, trying to scrape out a living for their families in a land where there were more stones than soil, I understand that he and my other family members were the building blocks of my own conviction that all men and women are equal. My progressive point of view is merely a relay race, with my ancestors having handed over the baton from their part of the race is run.
I wonder what ideas I hold that, years from now, will cause my children and their children to wince and say, My family believed that?