RESTORING FAMILY ROOTS

It's hard to believe that so many years have passed since 2014 when I found the World War I draft card of my maternal great grandfather via Ancestry.com that would provide the miraculous break I needed to find dozens of my enslaved ancestors on an inconspicuous Sea Island off the coast of South Carolina.  

          It was well past midnight as I hunched over the glaring screen of a desktop computer clicking through hundreds of filtered cards of African Americans from Beaufort County, South Carolina as I began to doze off.  

          The monotony of going through so many of those documents was about to send me to dreamland, I thought, as I prepared to shut down the system without finding the precious form that would likely confirm outstanding information, including birthplace and parenthood data for my longshoreman fore-bearer, also known as "Bill Mitchell."

However, before shutting the computer down, I thought a few minutes earlier that I had glimpsed at something that was quite tantalizing. At first, I started to ignore it, but my curiosity got the best of me. A spark of adrenaline pried open my probable blood-shot eyes a wee bit as I decided to navigate back to a draft card about 10 entries earlier with a very interesting racial description on it -- "Ethiopian."

Why would a Black American's draft card have that word "Ethiopian" on it, I wondered?  Was he a follower of a particular Black activist movement such as Marcus Garvey's back-to-Africa initiative?  Was he actually a native of Africa's Ethiopia?  Perhaps he belonged to a church or congregation that often used that Biblical descriptive, I surmised.

The adrenaline exploded when at the top of the online card I read the birth date that matched my maternal grandfather's, born on Christmas Eve near the turn of the 20th century!  Some how I had missed his name on that draft card, but not the word "Ethiopian."  Furthermore, on that digitized card I was able to confirm his parents' names and that he was born on "Spring Island," a place that I had not heard of up to that point.

You see, family folklore and oral history indicated that he had been born and raised on a much larger and better known South Carolina Sea Island known as St. Helena; so the revelation that Grandfather William was born on the more remote "Spring Island" blew me away.  I remember thanking God profusely, realizing that in the wee hours of the morning in my Elkins Park home, just northwest of Philadelphia, Pa., the ancestors and Almighty had swooped in to deliver the awesome gift of uncovering my family history.

Behold, my ancestors had revealed themselves to me, through the grace of God or my Africans' Mulungu -- an ancient word for the Almighty originating with the Bantu people having ethnic tentacles to such modern African nations as Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, Egypt, Liberia, Guinea Bissau, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

        DNA studies via AfricanAncestry.com, Crigenics, MyHeritage and Ancestry.com have confirmed my DNA origins to ethnic groups in such countries -- from the Bantu of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Luhya of Kenya, Esan of Nigeria and Mende of Sierra Leone to the Akan and Ashanti of Ghana, as well as the Bini and Hausa of Nigeria. Crigenics confirms that I have DNA origins to Sierra Leone, the Gambia and deep ancestry via Haplo Group L4 to the Mitochondrial Eve, the common mother of all humankind, said to be born in or around the east-African region of Kenya up to 300,000 years ago.

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Since that draft-card discovery in 2014, I've traveled several times to Spring Island, with my wife, Billie, as well as with immediate family members, including my brothers and mother, after I contacted a researcher and official on the island, the late David Lott, a Chicago-area attorney who had relocated to the Beaufort area some years earlier after serving many years as a corporate lawyer.  

          We've been blessed to pray on Spring Island at the grave sites of ancestral Civil War veterans, including my 3-times great grandfather, Collins Mitchell, and the church where many of my ancestors attended in the nearby town of Bluffton -- Campbell-Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded by free Blacks almost 150 years ago.  There I met modern co-descendants of my Spring Island enslaved Africans.  And despite Spring Island now largely developed with homes ranging from about $500,000 to well over a million bucks on swaths of land preserved as a nature reserve dotted with historical markers about my ancestors, we had indeed reversed some of the most deleterious aspects of the infamous Middle Passage -- notably family and cultural separations.

         In addition to the mounds of research that I had gathered, there was David Lott's information and the outstanding data of the historical and archaeology firm, Brockington Associates Inc. of Atlanta, that had conducted superb studies, etc., of where my enslaved ancestors lived in their quarters on Spring Island, not far from the so-called "Big House."  The firm's historian had also pulled together a wide-range of data that even helped to identify a slave overseer and his modern descendants now living in northern Florida.

          We also identified a manifest of the enslaved, with more than 300 enslaved Africans, many bearing the names of my enslaved ancestors, including Eve Middleton, born in 1790, when the enslaver George Washington was President of the United States. 

          My subsequent research on South Carolina's Spring Island, St. Helena, Hilton Head and other nearby Sea Islands, as well as Barbados (where many English white enslavers first enslaved Africans before moving their empires to South Carolina, including the family of a Declaration of Independence signer, Arthur Middleton and his fore-bearers), revealed much about my maternal family history that also includes roots to Savannah, Milhaven and Butler Island in Georgia, where the largest single-day sale in 1859 of the enslaved happened in America, notoriously known as "the Weeping Time." The despicable event was engineered by the slaveholder, Pierce Butler, a Philadelphia, PA native with extensive plantations in the Low Country.

          Interestingly, Philadelphia is where my grandfather would ultimately relocate his family with many becoming members of the historic Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the original church of the AME denomination founded by the previously enslaved, Richard Allen, in 1794.  

          My research revealed there were many other historical ties between Philadelphia and South Carolina, including the funding of the historic Penn School on St. Helena Island that educated newly liberated Blacks following the Union invasion of Port Royal on November 7, 1861.  Penn, that also served as an organizing site for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the civil rights' movement, is today an acclaimed historic site and center concerned with preserving Gullah-Geechee culture and associated land that has been threatened by developers. 

         Meanwhile, research on my ancestors in Abbeville, SC to Halifax, Va. with the help of genetic studies have linked me with paternal "DNA cousins" whose family trees include the likes of the enslaved "mulatto" teenager, Sally Hemings, who President Thomas Jefferson repeatedly impregnated; the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as America's Black Muslim movement founder Elijah Muhammad. Ancestry.com meanwhile sent me a report indicating that a White ancestor was on the Mayflower -- John Alden -- keeping in mind that my ancestral ethnicity according to Ancestry.com is about 90 percent African and 10 percent European. Remarkably, there are also indications that some of my earliest African ancestors in Virginia were tied to maroon communities with possible roots to the first Blacks to arrive in that state in 1619. 

          And I've found and corresponded with co-descendant Africans via Ancestry.com's DNA matching program, including a woman living in northern New Jersey with Kpelle tribal kinfolk in Liberia, an engineer residing in the Cambridge, Mass. area with Bantu ties to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola, in addition to a woman with Nigerian Yoruba roots to the country's top scholars, business people and even politicians. In essence, we've been able to substantially reverse the Middle Passage.

 Closer to home, I've researched at facilities located in South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Florida and Pennsylvania. For instance, in South Carolina, I’ve gathered vital data at Middleton Place (plantation), the South Carolina Historical Society, Beaufort County Library, St. Helena Branch Library, the Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park on Hilton Head and Penn Center on St. Helena; other locales range from the National Archives in Washington to the Davis Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In fact, in 2006 I traveled with my wife to the first Middleton Family Reunion at Middleton Place where we met scores of people, some introduced as descendants, with surnames that also match my Low-Country family last names. I was greeted  (among others) as a possible descendant of enslaved Africans associated with the plantation and/or other Middleton family properties, based on various relationships and distributed literature that I still possess. I also met descendants of the Caucasian Middletons who kept in bondage my enslaved ancestors.

          On both sides of my family, there are harrowing stories of forced relationships, torturous lynching and other deprivations among an array of outstanding accomplishments, despite the incredible barriers, impacting my family lines with surnames such as Middleton, Mitchell, Hall, Hill, Sibert (Siebert, Sybert, Siburt and Seibert), Pinckney, Hamilton, Smalls, Simmons, Edwards, Scott and Rogers, etc.

          Savoring the supreme joy of reuniting with spirits of my ancestral kinfolk and contemporary co-descendants, I have truly come to a deeper and blessed understanding of who I am and "from whence we came," made possible by the visionary handwriting on a draft card of my grandfather who proudly acknowledged in 1918 his "Ethiopian" or African origins.

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