My friend and cousin Derry sent this to me this morning commenting on my recent blog on GenealogyWise.com (Professor Gates, Michelle's Great-Great-Great-Granddaddy and Mine) and it echoes what I have been thinking. This is what she wrote:
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Hi Sally,
Glad to hear the article led you to create a blog. What a good idea.
We lived in Germany for several years during the 1960s. I was very interested in the way the Germans went about educating their people about the horrible events of WWII. Their newsreels and documentaries spared no one's sensibilities. Not much room for denial.It seems to me that admitting what the consequences of legalized slavery might be to later generations is difficult but necessary if we are ever to get our heads straight about what it is to be American. It is really hard for me to admit that slavery is part of our heritage. And the too common attitude that Aw, shucks it wasn't so bad, is really shabby. So, good for you girl. You are facing it with facts. And most important they are facts that will be valuable to other people.Love, Derry
The reference to Germany is relevant and we Americans are in need of a national conversation about our greatest shame. The Gates article is a good start. But after the summer of screaming, gun-toting, Obama hating protesters, and a "You lie" yelling Congressman, in a climate like this who could possibly imagine a group of people who could go about gently, kindly, compassionately, peacefully doing something positive and useful toward healing our wounds?We can. Genealogists: amateurs, professionals, corporate, religious, academic, local, international, etc.
We, you and I and all of us can lead this as a significant gift of good will in the cause of human rights and respect for everyone's right to know their own family. Genealogists can lead a gentle revolution of love and respect by demanding more from our own professional community and more from ourselves to offer our services and find new ways to make this information far more accessible than it has ever been.There is no excuse for African Americans to be denied what is hidden and ignored in big archives such as Ancestry.com and the LDS Church files and many other storehouses, and in the records of millions of amateur genealogists.
I have found the names of 59 enslaved persons, mainly in my family’s eighteenth and nineteenth century wills, while sitting right here in my own bedroom in the last 10 months using a book I had on my shelf for 25 years and genealogical materials I received unsolicited from my late father-in-law's 80 year-old cousin. I found the names because I started looking for them.
Genealogists, let’s get busy and locate the names of those unfortunate people held in slavery by our own relatives. Those names are not buried under sands of Ethiopia waiting for archaeologists to find them like the four million year-old skeletons Lucy or Ardi. They are within in our own reach!
Most important of all, we white family genealogists, must make good faith efforts to search our own records for slave names. We can and must do this for our own sakes and for the soul of our country.
