Family history surprises

Poststructural Pub
1

Wow. I’m listening to a couple of tapes of my mother’s elder sister’s reminiscences. My mother came from South Africa, and exiled herself in the late forties shortly after the election in which the afrikaner National Party first came to power and began to enact what became apartheid. My mother decided that could’t live with this and emigrated. However, she’s the only one in the family who felt that; her older sister and younger brother stayed.

Anyway, Marguerite was born in 1919 or so and grew up in a very rural area in which there was no electricity. Before 1925 there wasn’t even a railway. She was only a generation removed from what counts as ‘pioneer days’ in the that area.

Anyway, she startled me by casually explaining that her great grandmother’s slaves built an heirloom piece of furniture that now belonging to another relative. Slaves? My great great grandmother was a slave owner? That’s a bit unsettling. She hastily adds that when emancipation came to SA, her great great gandmother’s slaves stayed on and became employees. She and they were all quite elderly at the time.

2

No doubt we all have skeletons, both in and out of the closet. My kin are from SW Virginia and maritime North Carolina. I can’t imagined they were all enlightened back in the day.

3

At the start of the rebellion in the American colonies my family were simple weavers and ship captains in Ireland. Eventually they were approached by some American rebel businessmen who were hiring privateers. Being enterprising sorts, and enamoured with the nobility of the cause, they took the job. Their modus operandi was prey upon British shipping, run down to the west coast of Africa where they would pick up and transport highly skilled labour to the West Indies. I assume these labourers paid hefty fees for passage which my ancestor would then use to buy supplies for the colonies in rebellion. After a very short time my ancestor was captured by the British at the mouth of Delaware Bay and incarcerated in a prison ship off the coast of New York where he survived for eighteen months, no mean feat. I always assume he treated his passengers from Africa much better than the British treated him.

4

Like emm, my family has been in the South for a long, long time.
I take solace in the fact that they were largely poor farmers, and
couldn’t afford to own much of anything/anyone.

5

Simon, that’s quite a story for a family to finally be telling. I’d love to know why they waited so long to share this. This isn’t something a person forgets.

I’ve always appreciated coming from a family where my Grandparents were the first to get off the boat. Can’t blame nothing on us except that Grandpap was one of the early UMW (United Mine Workers) and that’s a source of pride. They came from Czechoslovakia where dirt floors would have been a luxury.

6

Maybe on the Slovak side. :wink:

7

Yes actually. It was the Slovak side. At least the food was better than the other side.

8

I got slave-holders in my ancestry too.

9

Here’s a dullish episode that nonetheless shows a lot about the attitude prevalent among english-speaking whites in this milieu.

…and, as it happened, there was a cyclone and the roof blew off the house and landed in the vegetable garden at the side of the house. Just one little bit of roof was left, and the piano was pushed under it. And my mother and I (My aunt M’s a one-year-old in this story, so it must be '19 or '20) were taken out to an outbuilding at the back, which had a thatched roof and which had not been damaged. Then my father sent a message to the only person in the district who had a motor-car to come and collect us, and take me in - and my mother in - to the nursing home in [a tiny village in the Drakensberg foothills of East Griqualand]. There was no hospital but there was this nursing home, which had no baby’s cot. And my mother and I had to sleep in the same bed.

But the night that the roof blew off, the africans must have gone straight across to my neighbour and told him. And he arrived before daylight with his wagon in-spanned (she means a team of oxen pulling an ox-cart) and poles and sails on his wagon to cover the roof of our house. Which shows how wonderful neighbours were in those days, and how very necessary.

I’ve heard my mother use the term ‘the africans’ in exactly the same way when talking about her childhood. In this passage my aunt means the servants and farmworkers*, but that’s not necessarily the case in every context. I’m sure she knows the name of whoever it was who went to the neighbour, but it doesn’t occur to her to identify the person as anything but a collective. "The africans’ carried the message**. En masse, I presume.

I also can’t help noticing that when she’s talking about neighbours looking after each other, she means the white guy. She doesn’t thank the person who - on their own initiave - braved the night in a cyclone to fetch the more useful help. Those hill farms were huge and not close together, so the journey was very likely at least a mile each way.

~~

*this is well beyond the slave era; they’re employees who lived on or very near the (sheep) farm.

** In South Africa even the relatively poor whites were so much richer than non-whites that it was easy to afford servants. It was a common mark of pride for whites to say that their servants had been with them ‘forever’, but I can’t recall my mother referring to even one by name. And as I said, she never said a thing about slaves. You know, its not impossible that she never knew. She was young when she left SA and this may as well have been stuff that just didn’t get talked about.

~~

I’m not posting this to trash my aunt or my mother. As I noted, they were what counted as liberals in their society, but still the racial blind spots are massive.

10

Thanks for posting. It’s really interesting. Keep looking and you might find a slave FOR an ancestor. I have black ancestors on my Spanish side but its not clear if they were ever slaves, possibly just sailors, early to Hispanic New World. After 1492, a lot of exiled Jews and “moors” (from Berber to Arabs) spread into the new world. A lot of people don’t know it, but there was a special class of Caribeann immigrants who were black but not slaves. I forgot the special name for 'em but they were known to dress really flashy - - the original pimp daddies.

On my dad’s side (Anglo-American) I found one ancestor who posted a classified ad in the Burlington (N.J.) paper because his DUTCH indentures ran off. it was just like a runaway slave notice and even described what their clothing was like and facial features, hair, etc. Half of my Yankee ancestors were Quakers, the other half New Englanders, so I haven’t found much other slave stuff. But I thought it was curious that he had white slaves, so to speak. Especially since we think that his grandfather was an indenture to begin with. A way of life that we don’t necessarily comprehend nowadays.

11

kinda like a student loan…

12

There were a substantial number of Irish slaves transported to the Caribbean, Virginia, and New England colonies, tens of thousands all the way through to the late 18th Century. I suspect it would be hard to find anyone in the Caribbean who didn’t have some Irish genes. Here in the East there are also some “Moor” groups that have some very interesting oral history traditions. I have family who did some work on some communities up in Delaware and another in Georgia.

Most of the Ouakers released their slaves by the time of the American Revolution. I know of a number of RSF botanists, who have left their names to a number of North American plants, who owned slaves well into the late 1700s.

13

A while back I toyed with the idea of writing an alternate history novel in which Ferdinand and Isabella lose instead of winning their war with the last of the moors in spain, and forfeit their thrones and their kingdom in the bargin. This, in turn, means that its the caliph who backs Colombus* on his voyage of discovery. The book was going to be about how this changes what the Americas become.

*he being an Italian (Genovese?) mercenary, and not a spaniard at all.

14

It’s entirely possible, but I’m not sure how likely that might be. The english side of my mother’s family was pretty prominent. She’s descended from passengers on the (1820) ‘first fleet’ of british immigrants to the Cape. It’s the South African version of the Mayflower, and there’s a very large on-line dbase tracking all the descendents of the fleet. I found my mother in it and my dad’s name listed as her husband. Someone among my living relatives there must have added, because she met and married my dad here in canada so the info’s not in any SA registry office.

As for the Afrikaans side of her family, its again possible, but its worth noting that the seperation of the races was and may still be a fundamental tenet of the teaching of the Dutch Reformed Church, which was the Afrikaners at prayer. They’re nasty old Calvinists. I know enough anthropology to note that the presence of taboo in any culture is evidence not that the act didn’t happen. It’s the opposite: a taboo is the signpost of stuff people want to do. I suspect that consequence of breaking it, however, is that any children would get re-classed as ‘cape coloured’*, and would be dropped out of ‘white’ society.

*the SA version of metis or creole, - a blend of African, European, and in the case of SA Indian immigrants.

15

Actually, what am I talking about? When Apartheid came in, the entire population had to get classified according to race, for the purposes of the pass laws, and for determinin who could swim at a white beach, ride in the white rqilway carriage, etc. They had a bunch of crazy ‘tests’ for scientifically determining which race was which. One such was the pencil test, in which a pencil would be poked through someone’s hair, and if it didn’t fall out, they were either african or coloured. By this and similar tests, siblings were frequently declared to be of different races.

Thus, there must have been a fair number of people who ended up white despite having a significant amount of non-european genes.

16

you think you’ve got ancestry problems, my great grandfather played the banjo … :open_mouth:

17

Virginia had the Racial Integrity Act and Sterilization Act to protect white folks,(mostly to maintain Anglo-Saxon purity, I gather they had a club of some sort) from contamination. Much of that legislation was repealed by '79, 1979, there was even an apology 2002.