When the Ancestors Call

In the last year, I have invited my students to join me in family history research. Some have tried it and, for whatever the reason, moved on at least for the time being. But, two students truly have caught the bug, or whatever it is that makes genealogists nearly obsessed with finding their ancestors, other people's ancestors, and with making sense of the past. The two students have written really fantastic papers on two slave owners from Holly Springs, Mississippi, and they presented their papers last month (October) at an undergraduate research conference. As one of the students talked about his work, he explained that he continued to be motivated by the family of his subject. It is as if, he said, "they" are pushing me to continue. Perhaps needless to say, that particular statement got no response from the audience, and I felt a little embarrassed for my student, whom I did not forewarn that academics do not tend to give credit for their work or even their inspiration to the dead. At the same time, the student's naivete was refreshing, and I was reminded by it that those of us who have learned what statements are acceptable and what statements are not acceptable should lose some of our inhibitions.

I have done so in the last two weeks, and I do so now in this post. I feel that I must, for there is simply no denying that at this point something really strange and wonderful is occurring in my research.

It began very unintentionally on my part. I was trying to decide where to go next in the research--what exactly I wanted to assign my students to do this semester. A colleague had given me a yearbook from 1966, and I had brought it home on a Friday. At some point on Saturday, my gut led me to look through the yearbook, and as I did so I was attuned to names that rang a bell from The Register of Freedmen, which I have been "studying" for three years. Pretty quickly, I came across the surname Gatewood. A gentleman by the name of Lafayette Gatewood had graduated from the college in 1964. The name was recognizable to me, so I checked The Register, and indeed I found two freedpeople with the last name and their former owner--Thomas Gatewood. Next, I decided to go online to see if I could find anyone researching this family, and there was. In 2008, as it turned out, the sister-in-law of Lafayette Gatewood had made a query on Rootsweb. She already had done some research herself, and her query was answered by two people who had been studying Gatewoods from Holly Springs and Memphis. A few days later, I took my class on a tour of the town (Holly Springs), and when I found us standing in front of the Gatewood-Boling House, I snapped a picture of the sign in the front yard bearing the name and sent it to Lafayette Gatewood's sister-in-law, who lives clear cross the country.

Days later, I was flipping through some notes and came across a few words that I had jotted down from a friend who has organized with me a discussion group on the topic of slavery. The words--"The Gatewood sisters are stalwarts..." Immediately, I sent an email to my friend telling him of the number of coincidences I had been noticing, and he said that he was interested in inviting one of the sisters to our next meeting.

This week, some of my students began researching their own families. I was so pleased with their work, delighted in fact to see them learning about their ancestors, reviving names that they haven't known and haven't realized they even desire to know. One young man, whose mother--by phone--gave him the names of two generations of family members--grands and great-grands, came up to my desk to ask what he should do with the names. I looked down at his notepad, and as I read the names he'd recorded I slowly began to recognize them. "Those names are awfully familiar," I said. Then, I noticed also that he had written next to "Katie Gatewood" the town "Slayden" located in Marshall County. "Oh my," I said to the student, "Those are my husband's relatives!" And in fact they were. Katie Gatewood is my husband's maternal great-grandmother, after whom his mother--my mother-in-law- Katie, is named.

Wow!

How do I make sense of this, that is, the fact that my eyes went to Lafayette Gatewood's name in the yearbook, all of the other coincidences that either led or caused me to recognize the name in other places, and finally my realization that my husband and therefore my own children are in fact Gatewoods? Here's the way I understand it. I am attuned to something, to what exactly I'm not sure. Energy? Messages that exist in the universe and that require a messenger, a channel, someone whose mind, body, and soul are prepared to receive them?

About a year and a half ago, I decided I would every day tweet one name from The Register. Honestly, I didn't have any other goal in mind. I just wanted to do this; maybe as a memorial. I realize now, however, that by tweeting the names I was allowing them to enter my long-term memory. Eventually, I gave up the project because I got really busy at one point and couldn't remember where I had left off. I know, however, that I never made it go Gatewood. I didn't get past the Cs. Yet, in the months I spent transcribing the record I already had committed so many names to memory, which explains how I became attuned to Gatewood and therefore heard "them" when they came a callin'. No other name from The Register has yet made itself so heard, and if that is the only other surname--besides those of the five blood ancestors I have on The Register--directly connected to me, then maybe this makes sense.

I have in fact been obsessed with The Register since finding it, and I offer no apologies for that. Maybe I've even been a little territorial. At the same time, I have tried to invite others to work with it, and I have been disappointed when my excitement over the implications of the record are not matched by the same level of excitement in others. I have reasoned that people do not get excited by the 150 year old record because they do not feel attached to it. So, maybe this is yet another reason why the Gatewoods called me up. By doing so, they let me know that not only I am connected to this record but my husband is as well. And what were the chances of that? How instructive! If two people--my husband and I--who are not from the same hometown but instead grew up hundreds of miles apart both are connected to this record, then how many more living descendants are as well?

How many slaves were architects?

I don't know the answer to the question, but I sure was proud to learn that slaves had built the beautiful Immanuel (Episcopal) Church in LaGrange, Tennessee.