Slave Girl's Story Revealed Through Rare Records

[Dover]

Slave Girl's Story Revealed Through Rare Records

June 8, 2005
Nearly 250 years ago a 10-year-old African girl was kidnapped and transported to South Carolina, where she was renamed Priscilla and sold into slavery.

Unlike the ancestors of many African Americans who were brought to North America as slaves, Priscilla left a paper trail that tells her story and connects her to her living descendants.

Thomalind Martin Polite is Priscilla's seventh-generation granddaughter. At the invitation of the Sierra Leone government, the Charleston, South Carolina, speech therapist recently visited her ancestor's homeland. There, Polite met with other descendents of Priscilla during a celebration last week.

"What makes Priscilla's Homecoming so special, and likely not to be repeated, is that Thomalind can trace her ancestry literally from the day the slave ship left Sierra Leone on April 9, 1756, to the present moment," said Joseph Opala, a historian at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. "We're dealing with a 249-year paper trail."

That paper trail includes correspondence, a ship log, financial accounts, and plantation records.

"For an African-American family to have all of these records forming an unbroken chain is probably unique," said Opala, who is working on a documentary about Priscilla's story. "It's like lightning striking twice in the same place." ...cont'd

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0608_050608_slavegirl.html

[kwassa]

1. This is pretty cool

My wife has an ongoing geneology project, but as far back as she can get is about 1830 with one branch. Most black geneologies stop just beyond the Civil War, as slaves were refered to by only a first name in census records before that. There has to be independent sources of lineage, and there aren't much of these in many places.

[VRine]

2. Research

Where is your wife researching? Most of my research is in Louisiana.

I've found an enslaved ancestor born about 1813, Nina Honore. She had two sons who escaped. One of them found his way to Boston and enlisted in the 54th Mass. (Glory)
Nina is the second oldest enslaved ancestor that I've found.

[kwassa]

3. Eastern shore of Maryland

Two mysterious grandfathers that wouldn't tell much about their past, one was from an orphanage. The other one and his sister who looked like slightly black American Indians. We later found out that the Nanticoke tribe had been absorbed into the local black population in this area. Other light-skinned and other features suggest much mixing. There are a lot of small abandoned graveyards with no markers.

[SemperEadem]

4. I love hearing stories like this

anything that helps African Americans to find the land of their ancestors is facinating to me. I recently spoke with someone who was talking about how some friends of his are taking part in tracing their ancestry using DNA. Apparently, there is some genetic mapping going on in Africa and the collection of indigenous African DNA is sufficient to start helping this group of African Americans to locate where they may have come from by the genetic markers in the DNA.

I think that it would be fabulous for me to one day be able to know the country of my origin, in addition to the continent of my origin.

[Dover]

5. Extreme Geneology - DNA test tells where your family was 40,000 yrs. ago

Extreme Geneology - DNA test tells where your family was 40,000 yrs. ago


Extreme genealogy
By Megan Lane
BBC News Magazine

A family tree researched by conventional methods can only go back so far before patchy records stymie progress. Now amateur genealogists are turning to DNA testing to trace their ancestry. But how much can this tell us about where we come from?

My family tree is rooted in Scotland, as far back as my mother has managed to trace the branches. But having reached the early 1800s, the trail has gone cold. There are blanks, dead-ends and inconsistencies thanks to lost, absent or incomplete written records.

It's a frustration shared with amateur genealogists the world over. But a record that can never be lost or incomplete is now available to those who wonder "where do I come from?" - their DNA. Thanks to recent breakthroughs in genetic testing, scientists claim they can trace our origins back tens of thousands of years - for a price.

US firms such as Family Tree DNA and DNAPrint Genomics will tell you if you are related to Native Americans and other racial groups. And in the UK, several operators offer a range of DNA services for ancestry research.

For about £180, the scientists at Oxford Ancestors will trace ancient maternal ancestry by testing mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed down from mother to child and changes little over time. It is this test which I have taken...cont'd

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4559253.stm

[Brewman_Jax]

6. Incredible story

I remember my mother had been trying to do the same thing years ago, but her grandparents just wouldn't talk about it. I guess to them, that was re-living the "bad ol' days." :(

[Lefty48197]

7. This is pretty neat!

I'm an amateur genealogist, and I have a hard enough time tracing my (white) roots. I've talked with a couple of Black people at the library in Detroit who were tracing their family history. I don't know how they do it. They were talking about slaves who were only identified by their first names in the census records.