


She died from the illness, leaving seven children, including infant boys, without their mother.Ĭate is the first I’ve found, but she may not be the last: Nahum G. When Taylor fell ill with spotted fever, Cate returned to his home to help care for him - and she contracted the disease, too. He freed her when she turned 30, and when she got married he gave her and her new husband a piece of farmland.īut she was still a slave. To let the writer of this book tell it, Phineas Taylor treated Cate well. Her life, her human life, was purchased for a box of butter. ‘Either the child could not have been worth much, or the box of butter must have been very large, as the best butter was not more than twelve cents a pound in those days,’ remarked a descendant.”Ī box of butter. Taylor obtained the child when a babe, in Boston, making payment therefore with a box of butter. “Phineas Taylor once kept a negro maid-servant on the Burroughs farm. I hadn’t found confirmation that was the case for me until my most recent descent into Ancestry’s records. When you are a Black American, it’s safe to assume that you are descended from people who were enslaved in 1865, by the time word of the Emancipation Proclamation made its way to Texas, there were roughly 4 million people who were slaves. Those discoveries were wonderful little pieces to a greater puzzle, filling me with pride.
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More than one of my ancestors were free Black men who volunteered to join the Union army during the Civil War, members of the all-Black Massachusetts 54th and 55th regiments. Through those forms I’ve been able to affirm that my maternal roots are deeply entrenched in Massachusetts, mostly the north-central part of the state. I’ve marveled at the meticulous handwriting on 19th century and early-20th century census forms, the perfect, slanted script a far cry from my own, sloppy after years of scribbling notes while I interviewed others for stories. The building and neon Schrafft’s sign are still there, so nearly every time we drive by it on the highway my daughters point it out. His daughter, my late, beloved Nana, also worked in the candy business, dipping chocolates a la I Love Lucy in the Schrafft’s building in the Charlestown section of Boston. I’ve seen the paperwork from when my paternal great-grandfather, a candy maker named Luigi, applied for naturalization, renouncing the King of Italy to become a United States citizen roughly 11 years after he immigrated here as a child. Over the past year I’ve visited the site off and on, and I always end up staying up too late into the night as I click on new links. It’s a proverbial rabbit hole, those little leaves offering hints about your family and where you came from, and in a way, who you are. Like a lot of people, I’ve spent hours on Ancestry’s website building my family tree. Now that I’ve learned of her existence, I’ve been thinking about her often. I’ve never met her, and in fact I’d never heard of her before a couple of days ago. J.File photo: A former slave market built in 1758 in Louisville, Georgia.
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The history segments air on American History TV (AHTV) on C-SPAN3 and the literary events/non-fiction author segments air on BookTV on C-SPAN2. Working with the Time Warner Cable local affiliate, they visited literary and historic sites where local historians, authors, and civic leaders were interviewed. C-SPAN’s Local Content Vehicles (LCVs) made a stop in their “2012 LCV Cities Tour” in Louisville, Kentucky, on June 8-13 to feature the history and literary life of the community. He talked about the slave trade, black troops during the Civil War, civil rights protests, and the black business district in Louisville. Blaine Hudson, co-author of Two Centuries of Black Louisville: A Photographic History, gave a tour of locations in Louisville which were important to the history of blacks in Louisville.
