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.

Writer Amy Tan on Creativity

"What is chance, what is luck, what are things

that you get from the universe that you can't really explain?"

Amy Tan, TED Lecture, Feb. 2008

Tan sets the perception of randomness against her mother's sense that everything has an explanation, yet she states that ambiguity, a lack of clarity (like her mother's or even greater), is part of her writing process as it should be. Still, she finds herself being pointed in directions, and she wonders how things happen, why they happen, and how she herself makes them happen. She has observed that the more she notices strange occurrences the more they happen. Creative people, she suggests, are "multi-dimensional." Her resolve: "I have to develop a cosmology of my own universe as the creator of that universe."

Perhaps what Tan is saying is two-fold: one, creative people don't exist in multiple dimensions or as multiply-dimensional without willful engagement of other dimensions or realms and, two, that their sense of what is real is partly influenced by their own involvement in creation of their universe. Accordingly, my cosmology would be I think both what exists and what I see (or otherwise sense) and acknowledge.

Deep stuff. Listen to Tan's lecture here.

Stuck Betwixt and Between

I've been writing elsewhere, but I miss writing here. Here's where I risk putting strange ideas out into the universe. Here's where it's okay to suggest that all of my work in genealogy is being assisted. I'm glad to be back!

In a blog post from 2008, I wrote about how a ninety six-year-old woman I interviewed turned the tables on me (or "depthed" me, her word) during the hour I spent with her. It was the first time we'd ever met, yet she seemed to know me. She in fact had a message for me: "You're well equipped."

How could she know that I doubt myself all of the time, that I put stuff out there into the universe and then want very much to pull it back before anyone sees it?

I'm not sure if my once ninety six-year-old--who would be more like a hundred mark by now--is still alive, but I thought of her this week as I sought funding advice for an important project I'm working on, a genealogical project which potentially touches hundreds of thousands of families. I was advised to pull into my work leading scholars from prestigious research institutions, leaders in slavery research. Sitting in an office chair across from my grant advisor I began to sink as he spoke of budgets and boards.

The next day, I scheduled lunch with a friend just so that I could vent, so that I could admit to someone that my passion for genealogy is working at the ground level--sorting through old records, getting their residue on my hands, being enveloped into the aura of a different time. It is there where I have experienced the most wonderfully strange things.

Yet my lunch date reminds me that without money my work will only take longer; I will only grow poorer as I continue funding my own research, and she is right of course, well, at least partly right. I nod my head for her, knowing all the while that I am not buying what she is saying. I am stubborn, and my ninety six-year-old's message to me also is not assuring me that I can administer a grant-funded genealogical-turned-Civil War historical project complete, I suppose, with articles, books, and conferences. And, I'm almost certain that I do not want to take things to that "next" level.

I am stuck then betwixt and between the place where the universe delivered important information to me--placed it right into my lap--and institutionalizing the information before it even has a chance to breathe its old life.

What would the ancestors say about my hesitation? Well, I suppose that they have already spoken. So, I must take my own advice (see blog post of July 7, 2010) and keep moving. If they can travel with me on trains, planes, and automobiles, they can move with me also through the various machinations of higher education, through funding agencies, book publishers, etc. Equipped? Okay. Equipped.

Keep Moving

I think that one of the greatest challenges for a genealogist is to keep moving between temporal spheres. The same spirit that pulls us to the past may be content to have us linger there. And if you love history as I do, this is an always-welcome invitation.

I usually display on my computer screen a picture that reminds me of an important aspect of my family's past. Doing so helps me to make the past a daily part of my present, a choice which to me seems radical in the present-obsessed culture in which we live. In this way, I am being true to my own spirit, which has never been fully satisfied being in the "present" dimension. At the same time, however, I am aware that I am sometimes so happy in the past that I fail to move actively and dynamically in the present. So as much as I need constant "remembrances of things past" to be at peace, I also recognize that I need other images that remind me of present realities and future possibilities.

So, today, I posted on to my computer screen this picture from my last research trip a few weeks ago to Fredericksburg, Virginia . This is not an example of good photography. I snapped the picture after taking a short break from driving, just as I was about to get onto I-70 to begin the second leg of my journey. Those of you who have traveled this route--I-76 through Pennsylvania to I--70 to Virginia/DC--are familiar with Breezewood, Pennsylvania as a major crossroads. One might also think of Breezewood as symbolic of the convergence of several spatial dimensions. This photo helps me to think about roads coming together and also about temporal dimensions coming together, and that, in my opinion, really is the work of the genealogist. We compose time; we are temporal composers.

A quick story about my time in Fredericksburg, just two short days I'm afraid. Having never stayed in this city, I booked my hotel via Expedia (a good service!) and wound up staying in a hotel located in Shopper's Paradise. (We have strip malls where I live, but this one beats all. There must be a hundred chain stores in probably well under a square mile). When I arrived in town, I had the hardest time finding my hotel as it was not easily located from the street/highway though it did have a main street/highway address. Though I had had no difficulty finding my way to Fredericksburg (about a twelve hour drive on several interstates), I had a heck of a time finding the hotel and was just about to give up when a kind man from another hotel (I stopped in to ask for directions) provided me a map of the shopping development. (It looked like one of those theme park maps). Anyway, after he gave me the map I was only delayed another fifteen minutes or so before finding my temporary home.

Well, the long and the short of it is that I hated the hotel, which doesn't matter all that much since I was in Fredericksburg for research not relaxation. But I mention the hotel because it is west of the interstate (I-95), and the archives I was visiting (Rappahannock Center) is east of it. The difference between east and west Fredericksburg or between the new and the old is like the difference between night and day, and I wish I had some kind of register to measure the change in my biorhythm as I moved about what for me was a saner, more user friendly area. (I know that my blood pressure had risen as I searched and searched for the hotel, and I cannot imagine that people who live in the city proper are not in general healthier.) Well, all was well that ended well, I found my way around and got some work done.

After leaving the Rappahannock Center (the main destination of my journey), I ventured to the Fredericksburg court, and, after that, I strolled down Princess Anne, a revitalized downtown district with dozens of curiosity shops--museums, gift shops, galleries, etc. Unlike Shoppers Paradise (on the west side), this place reeks of history. Its streets are tree-lined; the shops are easily accessible. Traffic moves slowly, giving one plenty of time to find parking. Pedestrian traffic along the sidewalks also is slow as people take in the interesting things displayed in shop windows. I would have made a day of it had I not placed myself on a schedule, which included getting back on the interstate to reach my next destination.

As I walked down a sidewalk, headed north back to my car, a middle-aged woman--newly emerged from her own vehicle--stopped me in my tracks. "Hey you!" she exclaimed. I turned around, looked behind me, to my left and to my right. "I'm talking to you. Hey!" she exclaimed as though I were simply acting as though I didn't recognize her. I repeated the same motions, at which point this friendly lady realized that I did not in fact know her. "Sorry," she said in a voice only slightly less cheerful than the tone of her earlier greeting. "I thought you were someone else."

Of course, this sort of thing is nothing out of the ordinary, right? Who doesn't have this happen to them every other week or so? But, when I'm on research trips I tend to make more of incidents I would usually ignore. For me, this woman who thought she knew me had a message for me. You are home here in Fredericksburg. Your spirit is recognized her. You are familiar. By your being here, the past and the present have converged.

MY GREAT GREAT GRANDFATHER, A SLAVE, WAS TAKEN FROM FREDERICKSBURG TO MARSHALL COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI AROUND 1836. That's one hundred and seventy-four years ago.

Who says that the ancestral spirits were not rejoicing about our family's "return"?

If Breezewood is a site of spatial convergence, genealogy is a practice of temporal convergence, and as we researchers move both across time and space we undoubtedly encounter many openings--places where dimensions or planes come together. But having such experiences, truly and fully experiencing the dynamism of historic research, does require not just a romanticization of the past but movement of all sorts.

All of us need multi-spatial images like this one I took at Breezewood. I hope you have a special one of your own.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Obviously, some ancestors crossed over before the invention of the automobile, yet, strangely enough, this seems to be their preferred mode of transportation! Some of you know what I mean.

I am not going to tell at the moment any of my strange car-road experiences, messages received while driving, rather I just wanted to think for a minute about why so many encounters seem to occur while one is driving. Right now--still recovering from a pretty strong experience yesterday evening--I hypothesize that ancestors like to bring our attention to the time/space differential only to convince us eventually to accept that the differential or separation is only a socially-constructed delusion.

We may seem to be way more bound by time than they are when in actuality we are not really that bound either; most of the temporal barriers we experience we erect ourselves. Do you wear a watch? If so, you measure time, put it in a box or a sphere, count it, and make yourself a slave to it. Doing so may keep you employed thereby making you socially funtional, but managing time in this way also keeps you from seeing other realities or possibilities.

So, yesterday I asked a specific question while I was out making a run to Walgreens. I wasn't talking to myself as I often do; instead, I asked my son. Within 10 seconds, the question was answered. It was as if I was having a conversation with one of my ancestors in real time. If I've continued to doubt the presence of ancestors before, this most recent experience proved to me once and for all that there is in essence zero point of separation between this side and the other, between the ancestors and living descendants, or between, as the Native Americans refer to the spheres, the Good Red Road and the Good Blue Road.

A question still remains, however, why they so often make their "helicopter parenting" known while their living descendants are driving. I could throw out some less than plausible answers, but I think I'll focus on two: one, a person's consciousness is slightly altered while driving. Operating an automobile is a relatively unique activity. One is focused (moving through time and space) while also open to other activities. The main activities are the movement and getting to the expected destination. When driving, one can multi-task, but there is a part of the brain trained on getting to "point B." I would go as far as to say that one is of two consciousnesses while driving. The one focused on movement and destination is in its own "zone." It is a slightly altered consciousness, which is why one can go on autopilot. There is an agreement between the brain and the body that can get you to your destination even when your whole mind is not on this goal. While you are "zoned out" in this way, the ancestors have easy access to you.

A second posssibility is that as you travel across space, you cross many vertices where beings on each road meet. Bring together such openings and a driver's altered consciousness and you have the perfect opportunity for engagement between beings on one side of the road, so to speak, and beings on the other side.

For me, such encounters are usually very fast, so fast in fact that I am left feeling like I have entered a different realm, a quite different time/space from the one in which my feet are firmly (for the most part) planted.

Actually, yesterday, I was not the driver; my son was. Yet, I think that one can have these same experiences whether driving or riding since the rider pretty much experiences most of what a driver does. In any case, this is what happened to me yesterday, and though such experiences are still for me somewhat unsettling, they are also enlightening.

One day, I'll share my train experience on my return last summer from the National Archives!

Every Decision Potentially Merges Time

For the last several days, I have been meditating on my ancestors' decision to leave the Marshall County, Mississippi plantation where they were slaves. I've been thinking about their action for many reasons including a question that a friend asked me concerning the value of ancestral research. Simply put, she asked me what the value is of such work. How, she wanted to know, should descendants--so focused on their present lives--value knowledge of their ancestors? I am not satisfied with the answer that I gave her at the time, which was something like "knowledge for knowledge's sake." So, I have continued to think on what would have been a better response.

It occurred to me yesterday that the very reason why I was able to walk into the National Archives last summer and find my ancestors' names listed in a record of "contraband" was because they made the decision that I describe above. Think about it. That is the only reason. Had they stayed on the plantation, their names would not be listed in such a register. (Had someone acting in an official capacity visited the plantation and found them there and recorded their names, then their names would appear on that list. Same point, however.) Their decision resulted in their names being on a record that I am able to access one hundred and fifty-eight years later. Across all of those years, their actions connect with mine.

In this way, both their action and mine close up the temporal space between us, or merge time. Drawing closer to them in this way I am able better to envision them and to feel their decision. I get a better sense of who they were as I think about my grandmother and grandfather coming to the decision, how they informed their children that they would be leaving, what exactly they might have said to them. I see them in the slave cabin gathering what few things they had. I can even hear them talking to each other. Maybe they sat by a fire, and Grandfather Daniel shared with Grandmother Nancy that the guns were coming nearer. Maybe they both understood what that meant. Perhaps they had both heard of blacks in the next county fleeing to the Union lines. All of these imaginings, my imaginings, are connected to their decision. Because of it, I am able to breathe life back into what would otherwise be simply pen and ink.

It also occurs to me that these ancestors saw time differently than I have been accustomed to. While merging their time with my own seems for me a novel thing to do, I feel in my bones that they anticipated me. (They knew that there would be descendants, and whether ten years or a hundred passed, they knew that their lives would be reflected in the lives of those who would come after them.) I don't know if I've said it before, but the Williams ancestors left a wonderful paper trail, unbelievably long for an African American family. They also, obviously quite consciously, marked our family with certain key names. Although few of these ancestors were literate, they used naming practices to point out significant connections. These practices are a road map to the white families who owned us. In the record of contraband for instance, I've noted that few families reported as their own name something different from that of their last owner. My grandmother opted for a different name. So, from this record, I learn the name of her last owner, but I also have every reason to suspect that the surname that she took is that of a previous owner. Not only that. If she took her husband's surname, and it is all but certain that she did, then it was he who insisted on this name. This is yet another decision that should not be taken lightly. This is a very conscious choice, and it sends many messages about relationships and about treatment under slavery. I feel that my ancestors wanted me to know their perspective on slavery. It could not have been good, yet the choice to possess one owner's name over another's speaks, again, volumes.

Finally, Grandmother Nancy's and Grandfather Daniel's decision to leave the plantation was an exercise of faith, an act that points again to their view of time. I have come to believe that they saw, as many other slaves did, God's hand in their liberation. Thusly faithful, they believed that the universe would continue to create openings for them and others willing to step into them. As I continue to make sense of the paper trail, I realize that every time I see these ancestors'names on a document that these were examples of their stepping out on faith. At the end of the war, they had yet another decision before them. Possibly, they could have returned to Marshall County, gone to work for their former master. But no. Grandfather Daniel then decided to stay on in Memphis and to farm on land that had been the headquarters for the Department of Freedmen. This opportune situation resulted not simply from his being in the right place at the right time, but from his imagining that place and, then, moving toward it. In this way, Grandfather Daniel by himself (Grandmother Nancy having died before the end of the war) didn't just live in time; he manipulated it. To see openings that others perhaps do not see and to take advantage of those openings is to negotiate at least two temporal spheres. And, as writer Amy Tan has suggested, accepting this multi-dimensionality allows one to see even more openings.

So, this is what my ancestors' lives teach me. I too may traverse multiple times/spaces if I am faithful and unafraid. Time definitely is not fixed, and it is not linear. It is multi-dimensional; its many dimensions merge, and they can be accessed in various ways. This is what it means for a people to have a cosmology.