Charleston, S.C. • “Now we’re cooking.”
Names whisked by as Brian Sheffey excitedly scrolled through the 1870 U.S. census on a large projector to find what he was looking for: a 13-year-old boy living in Alabama named Daniel, whose family included his father, Chance, his mother, Viney, and four brothers and sisters.
Chance farmed. Neither parent, the census noted, could read or write.
“He didn’t own his land,” Sheffey said of Chance. “He was more than likely a sharecropper. The chances were high he was living on his last enslaver’s land.”
They were new names to me, even though we share blood. Chance, who had been unemployed for six months and had $170 worth of personal belongings, was Chance Abrams, my great-great-great grandfather. My knowledge of my own family history had previously ended a few generations after him, with the names of my grandparents. I was unaware of the rest of my family history and wanted to learn more.
In that regard, I’m like plenty of other Black people who are curious about their ancestral roots and encounter substantial roadblocks. Official records concerning enslaved African Americans can be scant and unreliable. Stories and names are lost through time and distance. That’s where someone like Sheffey comes in.
Sheffey heads the Center for Family History at Charleston’s International African American Museum. He was born in the United States, but grew up in England, knowing little about his heritage. Sheffey researched his father’s genealogy more than 35 years ago and has been hooked ever since, hosting the online genealogy website and program, Genealogy Adventures.
(Leslie Ryann McKellar | The New York Times) The International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C., June 20, 2023. The museum, in a former slave port, is about slavery, survival and resilience.
The museum in Charleston illuminates the tortuous path seized Black people took from Africa to America and the repercussions it has wrought. Exhibits aim to split the difference between joy and sorrow, hope and despair. One of the museum’s distinguishing features is the Center for Family History, which functions as a beating heart of the institution in helping Black people trace their family roots. Anyone who wants to learn about their lineage can schedule an appointment and use the center’s resources.
I FIRST MET SHEFFEY OUTSIDE THE MUSEUM, where visitors are greeted by a reflecting pool that juts up against the original boundary of Gadsden’s Wharf, where tens of thousands of enslaved Africans first entered the United States. It’s there that Sheffey introduced himself as family.
Anticipating a punchline, I smiled. We’re both Black, brothers from another mother or something. Sheffey didn’t return my grin. He had unearthed a distant link between our ancestors several generations back. That’s how this journey into my family’s past started.
He told me that many view tracing Black lineage as a lost cause, with slavery serving as a permanent disruption of family history and links. That wasn’t necessarily true, Sheffey said, promising to explain how he tracks ancestry beyond the 1870 census.
He started by working backward through public records like newspapers and ancestry.com. He found the obituary of my paternal grandmother, who died in 2013. It listed the names of my father, uncles and aunts and where they lived at the time of her death. Next, Sheffey looked into the 1950 census to find out where my father, Paul, was living at the time.
Daniel Abram, missing the “s” at the end of his last name, my paternal grandfather, was 33 years old and listed as the head of the house. He was born in Alabama, married and working as a bricklayer. A listed lodger likely helped them make ends meet.
“For a genealogist, it’s just really easy to go back in time,” Sheffey said.
The trail led Sheffey to the 1940 census for Fox Mills Township in Wilcox County, Alabama. A vivid vision of the kind grandfather I only knew in the last years of his life started to formulate. His draft registration card listed him as a lanky 6 feet, 3 inches tall and a scrawny 151 pounds. Brown eyes. Brown hair. A light brown complexion. He was born July 12, 1915, the same day my youngest son would be born nearly a century later.
The 1930 census revealed my paternal grandfather as a 15-year-old who lived in Alabama with his father, Dan Sr.
My great-great grandfather was 60 at the time of the 1930 census, Sheffey explained. He rented his house on a farm — strong indications that he was a sharecropper. He was 21 when he married Ella Stallworth, who was 15 at the time. Both could read and write, according to the census.
“The first generation of children of people freed out of slavery would go to school and the kids would come home and teach their parents how to read and write, as they’re learning how to read and write,” Sheffey said. “So, I think that’s what happened here.”
The U.S. Select Marriage Indexes for Alabama showed that Dan and Ella married Oct. 17, 1889, the same year that the Eiffel Tower opened and The Wall Street Journal first published.
The 1900 census showed a 31-year-old Daniel Abrams living in Fox Mills with Ella. Daniel was unsure if his mother was born in Alabama or Georgia, according to the census.
A January 1921 fire at the U.S. Department of Commerce destroyed most of the 1890 census.
Soon, Sheffey had arrived at the 1870 census with Chance, Viney and Daniel. Chance Abrams, my great-great-great grandfather, was born around 1829 in the town of Edgefield in South Carolina. He listed his parents born in Virginia. Viney was born around 1838 in Alabama, according to the census. Her parents were born in South Carolina. Both parents, Sheffey said, were likely enslaved together.
“Slavery was a business,” he said. “Plantation owners, even if they were illiterate, they were in it to make money. And what do you do when you run a business? You keep track of your assets and you keep track of your debits.”
CHARLESTON ISN’T THE ONLY MUSEUM with a focus on genealogy. Museums like Ohio’s National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and Washington D.C.’s National Museum of African American History and Culture host family research centers, as well.
The International African American Museum offers consultations and seminars in addition to the more than 1,300 resource books housed in its Genealogy Research Area and Reference Library. Visitors can use iPad stations to search dozens of genealogy websites. The museum is also collecting stories of octogenarians and older generations through video interviews to ensure their imprint is preserved.
As we reached the portion of my journey that went into the period when slavery was still a reality, Sheffey showed me how he navigated this era. Probate records, wills, dowry agreements and estate inventories all help him climb beyond the 1870 census wall. Freedmen’s Bureau records, established in 1865 to provide documentation of marriages, labor contracts and other contracts agreed to during slavery, are becoming more widely available through organizations like FamilySearch, a historical record site provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which donated $2 million to the family center.
Sheffey focused on one name on my tree, my great-grandmother, Ella Stallworth. This name would help fill in the gaps in my story — and many others.
Sheffey had spent years researching Edgefield County, where Chance Abrams was born. It was also the home of Sheffey’s four times great-grandfather, Moses Williams, who lived from 1769 to 1885, dying at 115 years old. Williams married two women, sharing 45 children between them, Sheffey said. His second wife was Mariah Stallworth; this is how Sheffey and I were distantly related.
“How does a man like that get lost in history?” Sheffey said of Williams. “I love talking about him because he really encapsulates a large part of this country’s history. He wasn’t just among South Carolina’s last living links to the Revolutionary War, he was among America’s last links.”
The Stallworths have deep roots in Alabama and South Carolina, Sheffey said.
“Those Alabama Stallworths show that they are also descendants of Moses Williams, or they have Williams DNA,” he said. “They connect to him in some way, shape or form. If you have 45 kids, that’s not inconceivable.”
Sheffey then walked me through my mother’s lineage, tracing how an enslaver brought my ancestors from South Carolina to Alabama. An Alabama courthouse that would have contained relevant information on my family had invaluable records destroyed in several fires, Sheffey said.
Ultimately, Sheffey found no famous ancestors like Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman, as sometimes happens when he digs into people’s family trees. But to Sheffey — and to me — he had uncloaked a story of resilience.
“They worked and they provided and they made sure that their kids got an education,” he said. “The fact that they got up every day, pulling up their trousers, facing what they had to face back in their lifetimes, lynching and racism, they get my salute.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
