 | | Dennis Richmond Jr.'s family photos.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times |
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Genealogy as a refuge — but also a history with painful chapters |
In March 2008, Dennis Richmond Jr. watched "Roots" with his father, and it changed his life. It was a Sunday, the Richmonds' day for leafing through family photographs in their apartment in Yonkers, N.Y., looking at relatives going back about a century. "Roots," Alex Haley's semifictional account of his family's journey from West Africa, posed a challenge: How far back could young Dennis trace his own ancestors? |
After watching the mini-series' first DVD, he ran upstairs to ask his mother about the names of her relatives. Then that evening, Dennis, a studious 13-year-old, went on the family computer and found a 1930 United States Census entry for his maternal great-grandmother. The listing included the name of her father, Brutus Bowens, born in 1889 in South Carolina. |
 | | Dennis Richmond Jr.'s great, great grandfather, John Sherman Merritt (1889-1921) in Greenwich, Conn.via John Sherman Merritt |
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"That just did something for me," Mr. Richmond said. "That's where the story begins: St. Stephen, South Carolina." |
Mr. Richmond, now 26, a writer and substitute teacher, is the kind of person who begins sentences, "I was born in 1995," or "My father was born in 1955." When he thought about his grandmother having parents, who in turn had parents, he was floored. "It blew my mind," he said. "The seed was planted. And I've been steadfast ever since." |
The study of genealogy conjures a pyramid, with a common ancestor at the top and successive generations fanning ever wider into the present. But in practice the pyramid is also inverted, with the genealogist a solitary point at the bottom, tracing the connections upward through ever wider generations (two parents, four grandparents, etc.). To the genealogist's question 'Where do I come from?' the answer eventually becomes: everywhere. |
For Dennis, finding his ancestors became a refuge from his school life, where classmates bullied him both physically and verbally for his studiousness and the way he carried himself. |
It was also a plunge into a history full of painful chapters, including Jim Crow and slavery. His father, Dennis Sr., had told him of riding trains to the South as a child, seeing water fountains labeled "white" and "colored." But his father did not worry about what his son might find. |
 | | Dennis' grandmother Joyce Marie Watkins, and she was born in 1937.via Dennis Richmond Jr. |
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"We didn't try to hide anything from him," the elder Mr. Richmond said. "Whatever happened in the past to the relatives, that's what made him him and me me. All of those experiences together made us as human beings." |
The relatives on his father's side had owned cameras for more than a century, leaving a pictorial record of New England life going back to the 1890s. Dennis dug into Ancestry.com's databases and then started visiting local libraries and historical societies. A great-uncle shared with him a family Bible that had belonged to his own great-grandmother, who was born into slavery in 1865, just before Emancipation. |
That's how near the past was, Dennis realized. |
"I knew, wow, I have slaves in my family, and I would like to know who they are," he said. "It was an amazing pastime for me. It kept my mind off the fact that I knew that Monday morning I would have to go back to school and get bullied again." |
 | | Dennis Richmond Jr.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times |
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The search was not just for ancestors, but also for the stories they chose not to pass down because they were so traumatic. Genealogy, after all, is a study of forgetting — sometimes forced by circumstance, sometimes protective. Dennis's great-uncle, John Sherman Merritt, said it had been very difficult to get information from his elders, especially the great-grandmother who had been born before Emancipation and grew up during Reconstruction. |
"She was a lady of very few words — 'yes,' 'no,' and that was basically it," Mr. Merritt said. "Back then, our folks were really quiet about what happened. Nobody gave you a real answer about what happened, but I'm sure she went through a lot." |
[Read about Dennis' search across genealogy websites and Greenwich, Conn., which in the 19th century had both free and enslaved people of African descent, including his father's ancestors.] |
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