By Courtenay Edelhart
IMDiversity.com
CARMEL, IN - History was one of Charles Barker's least favorite subjects in school.
“Most of it was just memorizing dates, which was boring,” says the amateur genealogist. “But I've really come to appreciate it now.”
That's an understatement. Barker, 68, Carmel, has spent more than 15 years researching and writing about his ancestry. The earliest relative he's documented is a slave named Cujoe, born in 1800 in Virginia. Barker is working on his third self-published book, which he'll distribute at an upcoming family reunion.
Genealogy is growing as a hobby, spurred in part by thousands of Web sites that have eased the search process. About 60 percent of the U.S. population has expressed interest in tracing ancestry, according to a Maritz Research poll commissioned by Genealogy.com. Blacks, in particular, have flocked to it since Alex Haley's groundbreaking 1976 novel “Roots” chronicled the author's family line from a slave captured in Gambia.
“Every other people in the world can claim a connection to a specific country except us,” says Gina Paige, chief executive of African Ancestry, which sells DNA tests that can be used to help identify an ancestral country of origin. “Because of the nature of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, our link to our history was broken, and there's an intense desire to rebuild that connection.”
African Ancestry's database contains DNA sequence information on 22,000 genetic lineages from throughout Africa. A test for a maternal or paternal line costs $349, or both sides can be tested for $590. More than 3,000 people have used the service since it began in 2003; about 30 percent found their paternal lines led to Europe.
Nichelle Hayes, 37, a human resources recruiter who lives in Indianapolis, has researched eight generations of relatives originating from Tennessee and Louisiana. She's looked into the death of her grandfather, who was shot in an Anderson bar in a dispute over 20 cents; and she's followed the emergence of New Mission Baptist Church, an Indianapolis church her great-great-grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Cleveland Sr., founded in 1926.
The church still exists and has about 50 members.
“I'm so proud that it's still viable in the community,” says Hayes, who also is president of the 60-member Indiana African-American Genealogy Group. “It's a wonderful legacy that he's left us as a family.”
Hayes is drawn to genealogy in part because she finds inspiration in her ancestors' struggles.
“They were farmers and slaves, and it took all those people to make me who I am in 2005,” she says. “It's fascinating to learn that we not just survived, but thrived.”
Hayes' great-great-grandfather was born in Boyce, La., but moved to Indiana to escape segregation. He preached part time, supporting himself as a laborer first in the private sector, then through the Works Progress Administration, a federal relief operation established in 1935 that offered work to the unemployed.
Barker, a retired chief information officer for an insurance company, also comes from a family that followed the traditional route from slavery to farming to the urban North.
He's traced one of his family lines five generations to a slave named Kaleb, who was born in Virginia in 1810. Barker first found Kaleb in a Montgomery County, Tenn., will in which tobacco plantation owner John Walton Barker left “Kaleb, his woman, Sally, and her children Henry, James, Millie, Payton and Sally and their increases forever” to his son.
The Montgomery County plantation house is still standing, and Charles Barker has been there and interviewed descendants of his ancestors' former master.
“They were nice,” he says. “They were joking that they should be interviewing me, because I knew as much about their family as anyone.”
Charles Barker's family was part of the Great Migration from the South. Barker's mother worked as a domestic. His father was born on a family farm but brought his wife to Indianapolis in 1936, lured by factory work.
Bookstore owner Dona Stokes-Lucas, 52, hasn't had as much luck with her pre-Civil War searching but says the reward is that much sweeter when an ancestor is elusive.
“It's jubilation,” she says. “They want to be found. They want their stories told.”
In the course of her research, she's interviewed Rosabel Stokes, a 100-year-old Georgia woman whose grandfather, a former slave, was the brother of Stokes-Lucas' great-grandfather.
“We think we're looking for the dead, but you find people all the time who are still living,” she says.
Stokes-Lucas started her search 25 years ago by asking her oldest living relative to type up the family's oral history, which told of two teenage slave brothers sold away from their Georgia family to toil in North Carolina. During the Civil War, the brothers supposedly hooked up with Union soldiers and worked their way back to Georgia under the protection of the troops.
Stokes-Lucas hasn't been able to find any mention of the brothers in military records, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. It was common for former slaves to fight alongside Union troops or do odd jobs for them without formally enlisting.
The government kept records on Black Americans sporadically or not at all at various points in the nation's history, so pinning down specific individuals can be hard, says Diane Sharp, a senior subject specialist in the Indiana State Library's genealogy division.
The first U.S. census took place in 1790, but a fire in Washington, D.C., destroyed all records of the 1890 census. Blacks weren't recorded by name until 1870, unless they were free. Census Free Population Schedules listed Blacks living in free Northern states before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.
Freedmen's Bureau records are useful, too. Established in 1865, the bureau was a relief organization for refugees and former slaves. It collected information such as birthplace, occupation and even complexion.
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