history

Dear Professor Gates:  I am looking into the origins of my enslaved ancestors. While searching the Maryland State Archives, I discovered that during the War of 1812, many of my ancestors escaped slavery with the assistance of the British through Chesapeake Bay and landed in Nova Scotia, Canada. During my investigation, I uncovered quite a…

My maternal grandfather is Grover Cleveland Ryman Jr.  He was adopted sometime after age 7. His birth mother was white, and his father was Indian. We have been told by my mother that my grandfather’s parents were married in Virginia, when this was illegal. My great-grandfather Grover Cleveland Ryman Sr. was run off, and my…

Emancipation Day, a holiday marking the anniversary of an act of Congress that provided for the emancipation of people held as slaves in the District of Columbia, will be observed Friday, April 15, this year (since April 16, the actual anniversary date, falls on a Saturday). It was on April 16 in 1862 that President…

My paternal great-grandfather, Sylvester Collins, lived in Baker County, Ga., for most of his life. He was sent to prison in the late 1920s. He is said to have died in prison five years later. I have been unable to locate a death certificate for him. I wrote a letter to the Georgia Department of…

I frequently receive requests for advice about DNA testing, and occasionally the questions involve the following scenario: A parent is dying or incapacitated. The window is closing on the opportunity to have his or her DNA tested in order to gain answers to long-standing questions about genetic origins. This week I turned to genetic genealogist…

With Ken Burns’ two-part Jackie Robinson PBS documentary looming this month, Negro-newspaper sportswriters will return to black America’s consciousness. The Negro press of 1945 to 1948 not only advocated for the desegregation of Major League Baseball but also, for Jackie Robinson’s and the race’s sake, became the de facto public relations wing of his team,…

I’m seeking help confirming a family legend about the origins of my late mother, Helen Sarah Louise Davis, on her father’s side. Her parents were Jennie Eleanor Marshal, from Pensacola, Fla., and a man named Charles Call. Family lore says that Call was married to a woman whom he could not divorce because she was…

One March day in 1984, Onnie Lee Logan received a letter from the Mobile, Ala., County Board of Health, telling her that her services were no longer required and that her license to practice as a midwife was revoked with immediate effect. The letter thanked her for her 38 years of faithful service to the…

My great-grandfather was Thomas Carter, a black American who came to Wales, U.K., and married a white girl named Susanna Evans on Oct. 5, 1871, at Calvary Chapel Pontypridd in a village called Treforest, where he worked in the local ironworks. He is on the Wales 1871 census, living in 226a behind the Swan Inn in the…

“Get the girl to check the numbers.” These words came from astronaut John Glenn in February 1962 as he prepared to become the first American to orbit the Earth. The trajectory of his orbit had been calculated by NASA’s new state-of-the-art computers, but Glenn did not trust the machines. Mercury 7 astronauts had always relied…