What's an Ancestor Worth?

My sister, Janet, and I just completed a 2-week, 4,000 mile drive across the country – from Maryland to California. Much of it followed the paths of our ancestors who first came to the continent, specifically Jamestown, in 1619. We went through the Cumberland Gap, as did most “settlers.” We spent time in Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma (where our father was born in 1923). For the remainder of the trip, New Mexico to California, we went simply as tourists.

One of my favorite photos with my sister -

in Sea Girt, New Jersey - ages 5 and 3

There are many who don't understand this fascination with the past. My elder daughter can't imagine why I feel any connection with someone thirteen generations back in time. But to someone who has stood, as I have since childhood, and tried to feel another person through my feet planted where their feet once stood, it doesn't really require an explanation or even have to make sense.

Just after getting back home, Janet sent me an opinion piece from the New York Times: “The Historians Versus the Genealogists” by John Sedgwick. Obviously, being an historian, Sedgwick is interested in history. But after writing a book and finding that he was related to a woman he'd written about, he observed, 'History and genealogy, after all, are two radically divergent takes on the past. The first says, “This matters.” The second says, “This matters to me."'

I'm not sure that's how I would describe it. After all, I'm acknowledging that I don't quite understand it all. But gaining knowledge about the roles your ancestors played in history somehow anchors you into that history, for better or worse. Stories that may have been distant and a little abstract, become less so. Don't go into it expecting to take pride in your history. It will be, at best, a mixed bag.

Learning of his personal connections caused Sedgwick's imagination to kick in. He began to imagine the feelings and actions of his relative, as well as of those with whom she interacted. He doesn't feel that this has an appropriate place in historical writing, but on a personal level, it mattered greatly to him. He could go beyond the facts and personalize them – he writes of a “felt connection” – not to create “fake news,” but to better understand the people who made that “news.”

Upon reading the essay, I immediately thought of political/historical issues which took on new meaning once I knew the ancestral connection to them. I had already reached conclusions on an intellectual level, but my reactions became more intimate with my new knowledge.

Quilt by Annie Mae Young using pieces of old clothing

When the exhibit of quilts, made by Black women of Gee's Bend, Alabama, arrived at the De Young Museums in 2006, I was immediately smitten. I went to the show multiple times, bought the book which told the stories of the women who had made them, showed a video about them to friends and even gave a talk on them at the Peace & Justice Center of Sonoma County.

My father had graduated from the United States Naval Academy and he told a story, many times, of the serendipity of being nominated for that school. He was born in a small town in Oklahoma, son of a man who traveled throughout Oklahoma and Texas following employment – in oil fields, auto sales offices, forges, whatever those hard times afforded him. During the school year, my father lived with his mother, an assembly line seamstress, in Dallas, Texas, but he spent his summers with his grandmother in Boggy Depot, Oklahoma.

Not much remains of Boggy Depot today

One day in Dallas, he ran into a friend who was on his way to take the admissions exam for the Naval Academy. He invited my father along and, on a lark, he went. Being a very intelligent guy and a good student, he was the one selected by his senator to go to the Academy. He went on to graduate first in his class – in three years. What could that story have to do with the residents and quilts of Gee's Bend?

James Robert Collier - USNA '47

The quilt exhbit, book and video all made mention of the tar paper shacks, their interior walls covered with newspaper and magazine pages, in which the women of Gee's Bend made their quilts. The women helped each other, often working on the same quilt, which would be stretched on a frame that could be lowered from the ceiling for sewing. It was “community,” a chance to sit and talk while creating something that was needed.

Women sewing quilts in Gee's Bend, Alabama

At the time I gave the talk on the quilts, I told my parents of my interest and my father recalled his summers in Boggy Depot. The women would gather, sometimes at his grandmother's small house, complete with newspaper and magazines on the walls, to make quilts. He remembered helping to raise and lower the quilting frame. Since his much younger eyes were better than his grandmother's, he would thread her needles. And with the story, Gee's Bend and Boggy Depot became as one – a piece of the history of the United States. Here were poor women, in two different parts of rural America, gathering in similar circumstances to create beautiful bedding for their families made primarily from scraps of fabric and old clothes.

A quilt frame lowered from the ceiling (not a photo of my family)

It was easy to imagine and appreciate the similarities between the lives of these poor women, both Black and White. While true, I know better than to look at just what people's lives share. As someone who is constantly politically analyzing situations, I had to look at what they did not share. 

I thought of a young Black boy in Alabama threading a needle for his grandmother and understood that, at that time, it would have been impossible for him, no matter how intelligent, to walk through the door and take an exam to get into the Naval Academy. He might even have risked his life trying. My father beat the odds, making his way out of poverty along a path that very few White boys could travel in the early 1940's. But it was a path forbidden to every single Black boy in the country. As I said earlier, this was something I knew on an intelletual level, but it meant so much more, packed a much angrier punch (though my father was the beneficiary of this system) when it became personal. 

I imagine that there are those who would be proud to learn that they are descendants of colonizers of Jamestown and the continent's first slave owners. I have used that story to impart another political conclusion, both in writing and in talks on radio and before governmental bodies.

About fifteen years ago, my uncle's genealogical research revealed that my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents (usually shortened to 10^thgreat-grandparents, meaning ten “greats” in front of  “grandparents”) were John and Sarah Winston Woodson. They sailed to Jamestown from England in early 1619 and, by the end of the year, had bought slaves brought from Africa by Portuguese slave traders (the slave trade had been underway for quite a while in the West Indies and South America). It takes a while for that to sink in (which it never really does), but some solace can be found in taking lessons from this history.

A drawing of slaves being brought to Jamestown in 1619 -

drawn in 1901

The Woodsons did not stay at Jamestown for long, but were invited to live on Piersey's Hundred (land grants created by England on land - belonging to the Powhatan Confederacy - that was not England's to grant), later called Fleur de Hundred, which existed until a few years ago and could be visited by the public until it was closed. They lived there until the Third Anglo-Powhatan War during which John Woodson was killed in 1644. He died as Sarah and a neighbor successfully defended the cabin, killing a number of Powhatan. The gun used that day is on display in a museum in Richmond, Virginia.

Woodson gun used in 1644

Fast forward to the demonstrations and political activity around the issue of immigration and the Sonoma County Sheriff's cooperation with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in deportations of  "illegal" immigrants. Having stood in support of immigrants on, primarily, an intellectual understanding, learning of my Jamestown "immigrants" related the issue directly to me and I could broaden my scope.

While people, coming to the United States for economic opportunity (and doing many of the jobs White Americans didn't want to do) or to flee violence related to political oppression, were being labeled "illegal," I, a descendant of the thieves of Powhatan land, killers of Powhatan people and enslavers of kidnapped Africans, was considered unquestionably "legal." Something is wrong here.

Questioning the definitions of "illegal" and "legal"

The usual argument is "but my great-grandmother came her legally." But the concept of legal vs. illegal immigration didn't exist until the entire continent (above the Mexican border) was controlled by former Europeans. Having taken a continent by force, most White people didn't want "their" country taken over in similar or even less violent fashion by others. Ellis Island and Angel Island did not exist for reasons of right and wrong, but for the preservation of a country on violently-taken land. Up to this day, the U.S. wages literal and economic war on peoples around the world and views with contempt the refugees it creates. And, for many Americans, coming from immigrant roots is not enough to create understanding or compassion. The real history has been so thoroughly misrepresented. 

The majority of people would be content to look at their ancestors through an intimate lens, one that filters out the larger questions of the day, then and now. Or, as many do, as a question of how does this affect me and mine without consideration of the broader swath of humanity. For me, this thinking is a work in progress. I know that I am overlooking much. But I'm working on it.

All this and I haven't even gotten to describing our journey. More to come.