In March, I attended the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) Consortium conference, held at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. USS is a consortium of over ninety institutions of higher learning in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Scotland, Ireland, and England who share best practices as they engage in programming and the legacies of enslavement and racism. Member institutions host conferences twice per year, with programs on both local and national issues. SCA also hosts a LibGuide providing access to additional resources for the Slavery, Race, and Memory Project.
Over the course of the weekend, the Council on Virginia Tech History, in conjunction with the More Than a Fraction Foundation (affiliated with the African American descendants of Solitude and Smithfield, Virginia plantations), hosted panels and discussions. I was especially interested to hear from Kimble Reynolds, Jr. and staff from the Reynolds Homestead, given this is RJ Reynolds birthplace and home before he came to Winston-Salem to build his tobacco empire. Mr. Reynolds emphasized the importance of building relationships between descendants and institutions when trying to reconcile the past.
After the keynote panel, there were small group discussions, focusing on incorporating this work into institutional and organizational structures. Diane Deffenbaugh, Virginia Tech, shared the following helpful takeaways:
* Be clear as an institution about what your objective is.
* Be intentional in creating a space where people can and want to reengage. Is this a place where descendants want to be? Do they feel they belong?
* Help the descendants community become fluent in the university’s administrative structures.
* How do we write narratives and stories that share the full history but at the same time keep certain other groups from shutting down?
One of the challenges facing Wake Forest is the long geographical and historical disconnect between the enslaved who were sold from the John Blount estate in 1860 for the benefit of the Wake Forest (WF) which existed in another county. Dr. Joseph Soares, and later WFU, funded genealogist Renate Yarborough Sanders to conduct research on the WF 16 to see if any descendants could be found. She has given several presentations on her work for Wake Forest and the inherent challenges she has faced. I am sharing an earlier presentation given at William & Mary, but she was recently on campus to talk more about her work to Dr. Soare’s Sociology class.
Her presentation, “Conducting Descendant Research on Enslaved Humans Owned by Wake Forest College” focused on one of the individuals, Joseph Blount, who she believes is one of the WF 16. She discussed the difficulties of reverse genealogy, comparing documents and lists from 1836 with 1860 as that is the estate was actually , the methodology and processes she used to locate information, and how to confirm genealogical information. Her goal is to locate living descendants, but thus far, she has been unsuccessful.
She shared the numerous challenges she has faced, including:
*Multiple locations—the 16 were sold in Edenton (Chowan County), for the benefit of
Wake Forest (Wake Forest, Wake County).
*Thanks to George Washington Paschal’s Volume 1 of the History of Wake Forest College, she has a complete list of the names (pp. 217-218, in addition to a copy of the will held by the NC State Archives). However, we have not been able to locate whatever record Paschal was citing, identified as Purefoy’s (James S. Purefoy) table of the sale. This does not match any records in the University Archives.
*She has been unable to locate any documentation about the sale anywhere. There are no records—no bills of sale, flyers, newspaper announcements, which she said was atypical and surprising.
*The Civil War provided an additional disruption at that time.
*The importance of identifying the purchaser is key, and she believes the name was originally misspelled (common at the time).
She described following Joseph Blount, (b. 1845) who married and had several children in Edenton where he lived for the rest of his life. Renate has followed him through the census records of 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, and 1920. He later abandoned his wife, and she and the children moved to Norfolk and later Washington, D.C. Among the records she has used to track the family has included white newspapers with Black sections, Black newspapers, city directories, and obituaries, but she believes the family line may have died out.
The difficulties of tracing just one individual out of the original WF 16 demonstrates the labor intensive nature of this work, in addition to the records not necessarily containing the information you need. Renate points out that she may believe she has found the right person, but proving it through multiple sources can be nearly impossible. Genealogy research is extraordinarily difficult, especially for the enslaved, as record keeping standards were haphazard, at best.
4 Comments on ‘Universities Studying Slavery Conference & Genealogy Research for Wake Forest’
Thank you for this account and all your work on this project.
This is a fascinating account of the difficulties genealogists face when trying to tell a mostly forgotten story. Thank you.
Tanya, thanks for all your good work on this project and for this account and the links!
Thank you for your involvement in this consortium, Tanya. The background, takeaways, and additional resources are helpful. I’m sitting with Deffenbaugh’s last two takeaways and wondering if there was additional discussion. One could argue for a more nuanced approach recognizing power differentials and distribution of responsibilities. I’d love to chat about that in more detail with you at some point.