Earlier this year, as she and her husband climbed into their Hyundai Tucson and prepared to visit the American South in search of answers about her ancestors who had been slaves, Michelle Johnson realized she had other questions.
Is she deluding herself? Will I find anyone? Is this truly so important?
“I just had to let go and say, let’s go for it and see what happens,” the retired Boston professor explained. “I had some reservations. But watch how it paid off.”
Johnson’s long search through family mementos, government records, and, eventually, the land where her grandparents previously worked exemplifies both the logistical and emotional hurdles and benefits that Black Americans face while exploring their ancestral histories.
Johnson, who formerly taught journalism at Boston University, had never considered researching her family history. An heirloom family Bible provided names, and family rumors surrounded additional facts, but she had little hope of discovering anything more.
“We all knew that as African Americans that our records are spotty,” she recalled. “There’s this thing called slavery that gets in the way of going down any serious rabbit holes.”
Prior to the 1870 post-emancipation census, enslaved people were frequently listed just by their first names, gender, and ages.
“To put it in a nutshell, you’re looking for people listed as property rather than people,” said Hollis Gentry, a genealogical information expert for the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, DC. “African American lives were valued according to how much they could produce as laborers.”
As a result, Gentry stated that Black Americans must not only explore their own lineages, but also those who enslaved them.
According to Ric Murphy, head of the Society of the First African Families of English America, a history society based in Palmyra, Virginia, the possible barriers have prevented many people from researching their family histories.
“However, as new documents are surfacing because people are now learning to do genealogical searches, the brick wall of 1870 has been shattered,” Murphy told the crowd. “A lot of barriers were thrown in our path, but we’re getting quite good at navigating the genealogical land mines that exist. It’s considerably harder for us, but also more gratifying.”
Johnson, 68, had created an Ancestry.com account after being interested by family history and images provided by her mother, Doris Yarborough Johnson. After viewing episodes of “Finding Your Roots,” a PBS show hosted by Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., she was compelled to act because she saw there were holes in the story that couldn’t be filled simply by browsing databases.
“I had this sense that there was information locked up in libraries or maybe some church records, that there was probably stuff I was missing,” according to her. “That was the big impetus for this trip, to break out of the digital space and just go down and see if I could find documents that hadn’t been digitized.”
She decided to travel South.
Johnson described the experience as meaningful not only on a personal but also on a global scale.
“It confirmed that Black history is American history,” she told me. “There’s history that predates all of us in this country, including the history of African Americans being enslaved and how they survived and excelled in the years after.” It simply taught me about resiliency and that the American dream exists in a variety of forms.”
A journey to the past begins
Johnson and his wife, Myrna Greenfield, departed Boston in April on a voyage to find four family names: Yarborough, Peaks, Turner, and Mills. Along the way, they were tailgated by anxious locals and wandered old graveyards.
“This wasn’t just a road trip,” she said in a story she put together about her experience. “It was a pilgrimage into the heart of my family’s history.”
Johnson sought to learn more about her mother’s family, including the plantations where they had labored. She was intrigued about her mother’s Scotch-Irish maiden name, Yarborough, and was aware of census records that showed some family members as mulatto.
“I knew from my grandmother telling me stories about the slave owner slipping down to the slave quarters that we had sides of our family who could pretty much pass for white,” she told the news organization USA TODAY. “But we didn’t know who they were or where that had happened.”
Her pursuit had become into more than simply a hobby. She, like so many others, wanted to understand her place in the world and those whose lives had paved the road for her achievement.
For Black Americans, she noted, such searches can be complicated, with family histories “inextricably intertwined with the painful legacy of slavery, the struggles of Reconstruction, and the ongoing fight for equality and justice.”
Johnson has two destinations in mind. Her mother had pleasant recollections of her childhood home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and her birthplace in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where she spent summers with her grandparents.
Librarians at both locations were more helpful than she could have expected. When she arrived in Spartanburg, a local librarian had already retrieved resources, with books and computer printouts on a table waiting for her.
“I dropped my jaw when we walked up and she showed us what she’d found,” Johnson told me. “Not only was there a fair amount of material on us, but she explained that was because my family was owned by one of the biggest plantation and slave owners in the county.”
According to an 1850 “slave schedule,” Govan Mills owned over 100 slaves in North and South Carolina.
“Records for the white side are always voluminous because they had to file taxes, slave schedules and records of real estate sales and purchases,” according to Johnson. “I almost passed out. I had been hunting for this information for years, and now it was right in front of me.
She and Greenfield began marking printouts and photographing pages from non-circulated books with details on her family history. Johnson discovered that slaves were employed not just as labor, but also as collateral to acquire property and goods, with two individuals she identified as Jerry and Myra Mills, her great-great-grandparents, recorded by their first names in the 1850 documents.
Discovering lived truths prompts mix of emotions
Unearthing one’s ancestors’ lived truths, particularly those affected by enslavement, can elicit a wide range of emotions, according to the Smithsonian’s Gentry.
“You get the whole gamut, from ecstasy and joy to sorrow and grief,” she told me. “It’s like, ‘I found them,’ and that brings delight. Then there’s the sadness of learning they had a monetary value and were handled in a specific way. It’s sad to grasp the ramifications of that information.”
Johnson had accepted the idea that her family were enslaved for years, but seeing their status formally documented was shocking.
She discovered that the beautiful estate where Govan Mills formerly lived was not only still standing just across the border in Tryon, North Carolina, but was also on the National Register of Historic Places. She discovered an online invitation to a recent event, which included instructions to the location.
She and Greenfield drove there, expecting to discover the house and take a short photo in front, with Johnson clutching a photograph of her great-great-grandmother. Instead, they met the home’s present residents, a white couple who invited them in for drinks and a tour, with the four of them discussing art, history, and ancestry – a scenario that would have exceeded Jerry and Myra Mills’ wildest imaginations.
Jeff and Sherry Carter showed Johnson and Greenfield the former kitchen and slave quarters behind the home, as well as Govan Mills’ 1862 will, which valued Jerry and Myra Mills and their two children at $2,700 (equivalent to $8 million today).
“They had taken the slave cabin and pieced it together with this old kitchen and use it as a guesthouse now,” Johnson informed the crowd. “There was a ladder resting against it, and they told us that the enslaved people working there would have used it to get to the second floor. … I wondered if any of my relatives would have been present. Would they have worked in the kitchen? Being in that area where some of them could have been was quite moving.”
According to census records from 1870, Jerry and Myra Mills remained in the Spartanburg region after freedom, where they legally married in 1866 – a right they did not have when enslaved. Myra was a widow by 1900, and her 1916 death certificate claimed cancer as the cause of death, with no information about her parents or place of birth.
The Mills’ lifetimes covered two significant American historical periods: the antebellum South and the post-Civil War era. Susan, their twice-widowed daughter, would carry on the family line from Reconstruction to the early Civil Rights Movement, with two marriages that included the Turner and Peak surnames.
Because South Carolina retained no official records before 1911, Johnson explained, there was no record of Susan’s marriage to Andy Turner, which Ancestry.com estimated to have occurred about 1893.
By 1920, however, documents stated she had married farmer Simon Peak, a former slave who grew up during the Civil War.
The same documents named Johnson’s grandmother, 9-year-old Annie Mae, as one of the children in the Peak home. Between 1930 and 1937, the Peaks relocated to Winston-Salem.
Meanwhile, Annie Mae Peak married Dowd Yarborough in 1935, and the couple eventually moved to Baltimore. While Dowd died in strange circumstances, Annie Mae persevered with only a grade-school education, inspiring her three children to succeed, with Johnson’s mother and uncle getting advanced degrees from historically Black universities.
‘The ancestors will talk to you’
Johnson’s expectations were significantly exceeded, and when she and Greenfield began their return trip to Boston, Johnson recommended a brief stop in rural Franklinton, North Carolina, where a death record indicated that a member of the Yarborough family had been buried.
The two strolled into a local cemetery traditionally reserved for nonwhites and discovered numerous Yarboroughs, but none matched the names from Johnson’s study.
Instead, they stopped for lunch, where their waitress inquired as to what had brought them to town, chuckling as she learned they were looking for Yarboroughs, which were plentiful in the neighborhood.
The waitress suggested visiting a nearby tiny town named Oxford, which featured a genealogy room.
A librarian directed them to county directories with family narratives in alphabetical order. When Johnson turned to the ‘Y’ section, she found a page containing many of the names she’d come across in her study, as well as numerous anecdotes confirming slave roots and stating that “all members of this branch of Yarboroughs were/are all mulattos.”
The entire detour had occurred by chance – or had it? The librarian disagreed, stating that when visitors visited the genealogy room, they frequently reported feeling directed by ancestors.
Johnson had to agree.
“We would have completely missed this had I not stopped there,” Johnson told the crowd. “It was a hell of a way to end the trip.”
Murphy of the Heritage Society said Johnson’s experience is consistent with what he has heard from others who have gone through the same emotional journey.
“I tell people all the time that once you start genealogy, the ancestors will speak to you,” he joked. “They will frequently tell you where to look and whether a piece of paper is significant enough. The ancestors are restless, and practically everyone will claim that the ancestors directed them.
‘The ancestors will speak to you’
While there are over 400 historical societies in the United States, just a few specialize in confirming the history of persons descended from slaves, Gentry said.
Johnson is aware that she is not a professional genealogist and aspires to ultimately get her findings validated. In the meantime, she wishes to continue researching her father’s family.
She has shared copies of her story with her family, so that future generations can pass it down to their children.
“In doing so,” she commented, “we not only honor their memory but also forge a stronger sense of our own identity.”
Johnson advised Black Americans who are apprehensive about studying their own family histories to start small. Tools now accessible have made it much easier, she said, especially when companies like Ancestry.com use artificial intelligence.
Such advancements have spurred new waves of amateur and professional researchers, just how novelist Alex Haley’s 1976 novel “Roots” generated an interest in recording Black American genealogy using the means available.
“Genealogical research has been democratized,” Gentry explained.
Johnson emphasized the importance of reclaiming those memories in light of recent efforts to erase American history.
“I hope that folks make sure it continues to be taught in our educational institutions, but if it doesn’t, we will do what the ancestors did,” she told the crowd. “We will tell our own stories.”