WARSAW, Va. (WRIC) — For most people descended from enslaved Black Americans, the process of finding their roots goes something like this; they crack open Census records to track back from a grandfather or grandmother to a great-grandmother, then a great-great-grandmother and maybe one or two more greats before they get back to the family member who was enslaved.
That’s the simplified version.
It’s often not quite as easy as that. It might take many months or even years to trace back, depending on the length of generations, the movement of families or even the race classification of family members by Census workers.
But for some people, it begins even easier, beginning with a phone call from Kiana Wilkerson.
Tracking down enslaved descendants
Wilkerson, a research assistant, is working in the other direction. Using detailed inventories from the former plantation where she now works, she’s working to unravel the legacies of the people, listed as property hundreds of years ago, by finding their living relatives.
“Sometimes they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s great!’” Wilkerson recalled. “And other times they’re like, ‘That’s a lot of information to process. And at this point, like, I want to learn more, but I don’t know if I want to be so involved. And we understand that.”
With Wilkerson and the team of research assistants at Menokin, now a national landmark, what they’re becoming involved with is a network of living descendants of Menokin’s slaves.
“Descendant history is a part of American history, and it’s the history that has been left out for decades, centuries,” Wilkerson said. “And one of our focuses is to bring them and bring together families who don’t know about their own history.”
The research assistants at Menokin work to show some descendants how their ancestors would’ve built the homes. Taking them to a reconstructed slave cabin on the plantation. It stands right on top of the foundation where one was found.
And since they’ve worked to unravel the legacies of their ancestors, they tell their descendants what they know of them and educate them about the plantation their ancestors would’ve been forced to work.
Menokin was one of several plantations in the Mt. Airy system, one in which 8News Anchor Deanna Allbrittin learned her ancestors were enslaved for at least 150 years.
It was gifted to Francis Lightfoot Lee, one of the signers to the Declaration of Independence, when he married into the Tayloe family, a wealthy slave-owning family whose influence reached Washington, D.C.
“We are trying to connect his understanding of independence and freedom, but also him being a slaveowner, with how the people owned by him feel about this whole idea of independence, freedom,” Wilkerson said.
Lightfoot’s ownership of the property and potentially of some of the relatives Wilkerson is contacting, is something with which they have to grapple. However, since so much of American history is focused on those who owned slaves, Menokin staff is primarily focused on those enslaved and their descendants.
Challenging the narrative
Through one-on-one conversations and new “Descendants’ Day” gatherings, Wilkerson and the Menokin staff educate descendants about the movement of their ancestors. They challenge the often limited ways we think about the physical space slaves inhabited.
“From inventory books that John Tayloe III has done, we can see they list names of enslaved people and ages and we can see the movement between satellite plantations and Mt. Airy, so we know that enslaved people weren’t just stationed in the area for their whole entire lives,” Wilkerson said. “They could have been rented out to a neighboring plantation or sold off to different areas.”
Even in the time of Richard Henry Harwood, the owner after John Tayloe III whose inventories are the basis of the current Menokin descendants research, they know some of the enslaved spouses were split up between plantations. In some cases, a spouse might even be free while an enslaved partner and children remained on a plantation.
Wilkerson also wants descendants to rethink how they perceive their ancestors’ intellectual agency as well, particularly when it comes to the last names they may still hold to this day.
“Enslaved people were coming up with their own names,” Wilkerson said. “They weren’t just taking the names and last names of their owners. They were like, ‘No, I want to be a Gordon’. And they were really learning, like discovering their own identity and shaping that as well.”
Wilkerson says that, while it can be difficult to trace the genealogy of enslaved ancestors, it’s not impossible.
“African-Americans, have been taught that like, oh, once I get to slavery, I’m not going to be able to find my family and that’s just not the case,” Wilkerson said. “There are ways.”
Retracing and reconnecting
Wilkerson and her co-workers are well-situated to provide guidance to descendants of slaves, especially of those enslaved in the Northern Neck. Their own work has provided them with the experience to do so and it aligns squarely with a goal to give African-Americans — who, because of chattel slavery’s brutality, have traditionally had frayed or severed family histories — some of that history back.
Sometimes the history can be murky but with help, some of it may become clearer.
“It doesn’t have to be a professional genealogist,” Wilkerson said. “Their work is definitely very useful, but you know your family history more than I ever would, so you should be able to trust yourself [and] get connected to local genealogical societies and historical societies.”
And, of course, she offered the help of her team — by phone call, visit or through genealogy workshops held on-site.
But Wilkerson says they can offer more than genealogical assistance to those with a familial connection to the land. In the daytime, a walk around and through Menokin provides tactile reminders of how skilled many one’s enslaved ancestors were and had to be—to keep the land producing and to build each and every grand home. At night, the memorial slave cabin lights up as a homing beacon to find and connect with this ancestral home.
“There are bricks in the ruin that have fingerprints that we know that are enslaved people’s fingerprints, so people can touch that visually, see and think about how these were made,” Wilkerson said.
The fingerprints, so small, it crosses one’s mind they could very well have been a child’s.
