Using Genealogy to Tell the Truth About the People Her Ancestors Enslaved

Using Family Records to Tell the Truth About the People They Enslaved | Annie Hartnett

Stories in Our Roots, Episode 71

Heather Murphy: Hi Annie. Thanks for joining me. I'm so excited to have a conversation with you today.

Annie Hartnett: I'm really excited to be talking to you as well, Heather. Thanks so much for inviting me. I feel really honored.

Heather Murphy: Oh, you're so welcome. Well, would you start by just giving us a little idea of who you are?

Annie Hartnett: Sure. My name's Annie Hartnett and a couple of years ago, I started, getting interested in my family history. I was born in New Orleans and spent my early childhood in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, which is a tiny town on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. And then when I was six, we moved to England so, and I lived overseas almost my entire. Oh yeah, my entire elementary school, part of my middle school. I also lived in Japan. And moved back to the United States in high school, which was kind of a shock, culture shock. I went to the University of Texas here in Austin where I live now. I fell in love with Austin and I've lived here ever since. I'm married. I have a son and I have a dog, and I have four chickens.

Heather Murphy: Oh, great. I have three ducks.

Annie Hartnett: Yay. Yeah. I love my chicken so much and I love their eggs.

Heather Murphy: Yeah, they're pretty nice. So what is your story? You said you've just barely started looking into your family history. What is that story of how you got started?

Annie Hartnett: Yeah, that's a great question. After I spoke with you about being on the podcast I listened to probably at least half a dozen of the podcast episodes, and as I was looking at the episodes, and by the way, I enjoyed them so much, every single one like shone a different light on genealogy and how it can enrich our lives. And I loved the kind of personal growth focus, cuz I hadn't really thought about that.

But I listened to your interview with Cassandra Lane and it was actually her book, We Are Bridges, that was one of the things that got me interested in researching my own family history.

Heather Murphy: Oh, that's a nice little connection.

Annie Hartnett: I know like a, a little, there are all these little coincidences I've noticed that start to happen when you are really following your heart and your passion and doing what, what I believe I'm sort of called to do right now. And I feel like the universe is just stepped up to support me. Like each step I take into the unknown a bridge rises beneath to hold my foot, you know, as I walk forward. It's been a series of these like little coincidences and serendipities and that was one of them. And I enjoyed that interview so much. And I reached out to, uh, Cassandra Lane on Twitter afterwards. I said, oh my gosh. I just, heard your podcast interview with Heather Murphy. So that was a really nice connection.

But I guess going back further, when I was a little girl living in Mississippi, I remember my family talking about the plantation. One of the plantations that my ancestors owned was in our family up until really recently, the land was. It's almost 2000 acres in the Mississippi Delta, but on the Louisiana side. That land was finally sold out of the family, I think in 2010 or thereabouts. So I grew up hearing my mom's stories about life on the plantation. Now, she had not grown up there, but she visited there frequently as a child and she sort of, romanticized it. She talked about the big house and riding ponies and going hunting. And my mom was outdoorsy and sporty and she just loved all the outdoor stuff that she got to do when she went there, when she visited. So she would go there at Christmas and Thanksgiving and holidays. And I went there as well several times as a child.

And I also watched Gone With The Wind and, you know, those Shirley Temple movies like the Littlest Rebel that romanticized the Antebellum South. As a child, I didn't really think too much about it. Like I just accepted what the adults in my life told me and what the culture that I was living in showed me.

But as I grew older started to learn a little bit more about, well, what was a plantation? What happened on a plantation? It was before I became an adolescent, I started to realize this is not something to be proud of. There's a lot of darkness here. But my grandmother and, uh, one of my aunts was very interested in family history and genealogy. And so I heard a lot about it from them. I believe that, some of my family members were associated with groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy, and I was really uncomfortable with that. And my mother also was uncomfortable with that. She didn't, she wasn't into that.

I just kind of rejected it all. Just I threw the baby out with the bath water. Like, I don't want to know about that. I don't wanna hear about it. I don't like it. Make it go away. You know, just like I'm gonna put these blinders on and I'm just not gonna pay any attention to it. And I just, that's what I did. So I guess that's, you would call that like a form of denial. I was in denial about my family history and the reality of it, or I allowed myself to sort of go vague about it. Like, I knew it happened, but I didn't wanna know the details. I certainly didn't wanna glorify it. And I just, it became this sort of vagueness in my mind that I just didn't think about it very much.

 As I grew older and, you know, I have a college education, I have a master's degree, I mean, I consider myself fairly well educated, but there was nothing in my education really that taught me about chattel slavery in the United States.

 And what it was really all about and how it reverberates today in our culture and in our politics. As I started becoming more politically active in the summer of 2020, you know, the death of George Floyd I think kind of was a spark that turned into a fire for a while. And I paid attention to it and I started thinking about it and I started reading and I started, reading books like We Are Bridges by Cassandra Lane.

And something sort of, made me realize that this was a part of my journey in life. It was important to understand what really happened and for me to examine my own family's participation in that. Because, you know, you talk, people talk about systemic racism all the time, right? And I always thought of that term as this kind of neutral or a term that wasn't necessarily associated with me. But as I've done my research, I've come to realize that it was my ancestors who helped put that system in place. And that is something to come to terms with.

Heather Murphy: Yeah, and I think that is one of the reasons. Reasons why I love family history so much. That's why I got a degree in family history rather than just general history is because when you look at your own family, you see the effects of different laws or the politics or, everything that's going on on that macro level that you generally learn in history to focus on, how did that affect real people? What were the ramifications for this family, for my family, and the people that they interacted with?

Annie Hartnett: Absolutely. Really the devil is in the details and when you start looking at the details and the primary source documents, as I said, I feel so supported by the universe and I've just been inundated with primary source documentation since I started this work.

I have like 705 PDF pages from the, Louisiana, LSU special collections library that's just all about. My family, or it's just the, the collected papers of my family. 705 pages of letters, documents, legal documents, deeds, et cetera. I mean the amount of original source material that's come my way is just kind of overwhelming.

I decided early on, I don't wanna write about my ancestors. There are already things written about them. I wanna write about the stories of those people whose lives were stolen from them and whose stories have been buried and lost. I wanna dig them up and I wanna learn about their stories. That's what's interesting to me is those stories that have been forgotten or intentionally buried that I can dig up and learn about. And you would be surprised, well, you probably know how much you can discover about a person based on these historical records.

Heather Murphy: Yeah, and I think it's amazing. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show was that you're using your family history, not just to learn about your family, but to learn about those black people who were affected by your family and to shine a light on them and to honor them in a way that they hadn't been honored.

 You write a lot on Medium and one of the quotes on there that I really loved you said, "While I know that I can never make amends for what my ancestors did, I can at least choose to tell the truth about it." And sometimes that's hard. Well, it oftentimes is hard with this topic to be honest about your ancestors' choices.

Annie Hartnett: Yeah, I have a hard time being honest about it sometimes. Because there's a part of me, I discovered as I've been working through this process, there's a part of me that wants to believe that the story that I was told growing up or that I somehow absorbed that, well, yes, slavery was terrible, many of those enslavers were horribly cruel, but our family was different.

Heather Murphy: Yeah.

Annie Hartnett: And I think that's a story that a lot of white people in this country tell themselves and for me it's just not true. But you don't realize that unless you start to really dig. And the more I learn, the more I have to come to terms with. I recently visited one of the plantations that, the one that was most recently in my family. I visited there and I also visited with the librarian, the librarian of the Tensal Parish library and he is also the museum curator. Wonderful man, so knowledgeable about the history of that area. He and I spent some time together documenting the graves in what was called the slave cemetery, which is a collection of headstones and many more unmarked graves in kind of a grove of trees behind one of the cotton fields. We spent time together. I learned a lot.

And after I returned home he emailed me something that he had found. And it was photographs of A neck yolk, like an iron collar that goes around someone's neck and shackles. And they had been donated to the museum by my ancestor and used at that plantation that I had visited and that my family lived on that land for over 200 years.

It was like a gut punch. You sort of wanna think, well, they didn't do the worst things, but they did. So there's a kind of a, a grief process that I've been going through of like, learning, coming out of denial, bargaining, the whole thing. And sometimes the moments of acceptance. I have not gotten to forgiveness yet of my ancestors. I have not been able to forgive them. But maybe I'll get there one day.

But I do spend a lot of time, well, I have met some of the descendants of the people that were enslaved by my ancestors, and they have been lovely, and it's been such a joy to meet them and connect. I have also connected with a cousin who's descended from one of my enslaver ancestors. Because there was a lot of rape of enslaved women of course. And so I have probably many, many, cousins who or relations who are black or African-American and, haven't met all of them yet, but I've met at least one. That's been really great.

 It's been such a fascinating journey and it has changed my relationship to myself, to my country, and also to my Black friends. Because I feel like before I was able to be, be honest about this with myself, there was always this kind of in invisible barrier of maybe shame or guilt or something uncomfortable. Like I, I didn't feel like I was really as present as I could be in those relationships. And now it's like when you're honest about who you are and where you come from, and you can face that without the shame or guilt, just this is, this is what it is, this is what happened. I can be honest about it. important to be honest about it. That's how we're gonna move forward as a country, I feel as if we can be honest about where we came from and then work forward from that place of honesty.

Heather Murphy: Yeah. I think a lot of times what we try to do is we try to justify or try to make things better, but we can't undo something that was done decades and centuries ago. But like you were saying, you can find ways to live honestly, now having that knowledge of the past.

Annie Hartnett: And sharing it with other people. I mean, that's one of the reasons I'm so grateful to you for inviting me to be on the podcast, because part of what I feel like is important for me to do is to share what I'm learning and to encourage other people, all kinds of people, to learn about their family histories and if they have something in their background that feels uncomfortable or scary or shameful just to realize that first of all, that wasn't you who did it. You have no control over what your ancestors did. I can't go back in time and change them or change the course of history, obviously, but I can look at it squarely and try to counter some of the myths that we're still clinging onto.

Heather Murphy: Well, and you talked about that myth of that you had in your family that, oh, your family wasn't that bad to them. What other myths have you come across as you've been doing this work?

Annie Hartnett: I was playing pickleball with some neighbors the other day. And, the subject of my blog came up and one of my, my neighbors said, "oh, but they were just like, the slaves were just like part of the family, right?"

Heather Murphy: Oh wow.

Annie Hartnett: And I said, no, they weren't. They really, really weren't. And a lot of the letters that my ancestors wrote to each other and to other people, you can see that they, at least to some degree, or some of them feel very fond of the enslaved people. And that really puzzled me, at first, and I think a lot of people are, there's a myth, that, " oh, well we are benevolent. We have a good relationship with these people." I feel like that's a lie that they are telling themselves.

Because if that person is enslaved by you and you own them, and you have power of life and death over them, of course you're gonna act like you like them. Of course, you're gonna be friendly, of course, you're gonna sort of foster what seems to be a friendly and close relationship because you have to, to stay alive. But my ancestors, I can see from their, the way they wrote about the people they enslaved, that they allowed themselves to believe that that was a, a friendship or in some cases a romantic relationship but there's no such thing as consent in a master slave relationship.

Heather Murphy: I think it was interesting, I was reading some of your articles on Medium, that it was reading through those plantation ledgers that kind of gave you this aha moment that things weren't as nice as you thought they were because they kept running away.

Annie Hartnett: Yes, they did. There's a woman named Anne Willis. she's on my. my list of people I really wanna meet, you know, and I I've heard some of the folks you've interviewed, talk about speaking with their ancestors communicating with their ancestors.

And I, I have not done that, but I talk to some of the people that I'm researching all the time. I haven't started talking to Anne Willis, she's the woman who ran away, she ran away all the time. She eventually didn't ever, like, she just disappears from the plantation ledger. So I don't know if she eventually successfully ran away or she was killed.

I, I don't know. I wanna find out her story cuz she's just fascinating to me. And her obvious just like resistance, you know? She will not be, She'll not be enslaved. She's gonna run away. You know, she's gonna resist. And I, I admire her, her courage and her, rebellious spirit and her energy. I think it probably made life very hard for her.

And then there are other people, and you can learn about these people's lives by reading just the plantation ledger tells what tasks they did every day. I can read the plantation ledger. I have ledger pages over about, well, eight years, some years, like during the Civil War, the ledger, it gets very sporadic, I think because there was a war going on and they didn't have a lot of time to record the details of things. But it is fascinating. They, they write about the weather, they write about always about whether the Mississippi River is rising or falling, and then they write the tasks that were assigned to each enslaved person for that week or that day.

So, you know, who is good at picking cotton? Who is trusted to be sent to town with a carriage, who does the sewing, who does this or that, and you start to feel like you have a sense of the people's lives. It just a little bit.

There's another young man who I have talked to a lot, his name is America. And he was purchased by my third, great-grandfather. He was one of the people who was sold down the rivers. That expression comes from the fact that there was this huge migration from the upper South to the lower South to meet the demand for workers in the cotton plantations in the deep South. And he was one of the people who made that journey But I was just so struck by the fact that his name was America. I guess the first document I came across was a bill of sale, and then I found his name. The bill of sale told who the traders were who had sold him.

So then I looked online and I, I mean it seems miraculous to me, was able to find the ledgers from that slave trading company. And I was able to find, because I knew his first name and I knew his approximate birth date, I was able to find him on that slave trading ledger and see like how much they bought him for, how much they sold him for how much they profited. They made $200 on this young man.

And then another reason I got so interested in him is he was exactly the same age as my son at the time, and my heart just kind of broke, you know, thinking about how he was taken from, I think it was Virginia, and forced to go to Louisiana probably by forced march. Over a million people were forced to migrate from the upper to the lower South to meet the demand for slave labor, and he was one of them.

 contrast to Ann Willis, he kept his head down. He was a really good field hand. There's never any record of him being, you know, disobedient or being punished.

There's never any record of him being sick. He just was like this incredibly steadfast worker. And I feel like I got the sense of his personality. Like he just made this decision. "Okay, I'm gonna just do this. I'm gonna keep my head down, and then I'm gonna look for the opportunity to get away."

And in 1863 when the Union troops got close enough to the plantation, all of a sudden his name disappears from the ledger, and I believe, and I hope that he got away. That he ran and joined up with the Union Army. And I did find an America who joined the US Colored Troops around that time, but I haven't verified that that was him.

So, I talked to him all the time when I was doing that research and I felt like I felt sort of led, you know, like he wanted to tell his story.

Heather Murphy: And so how have you decided to share this information that you've been gathering with other people outside yourself?

Annie Hartnett: Well, I have a blog, so I'm documenting the process via a blog. I do post to my friends and family on Facebook. I'm planning, I'm hoping to start a podcast. and I wanna interview people. I wanna interview historians. I wanna interview the descendants of enslaved people. I want, you know, there's so many people I wanna talk to and I wanna share. I wanna learn and I wanna share what I learn cuz it's so fascinating.

Heather Murphy: Yeah. And I really enjoyed, one of your Medium pieces that saying, by doing this work, you're preserving history. You're not relying on. And what the curriculum developers put out, or what shows up on mainstream news, but you're documenting and being honest about the history that your family was involved in.

Annie Hartnett: Yes. I wanna see it with my own eyes. I wanna learn about it with my own eyes. The other thing I really suggest is to go to the places. Go to the place, where your family lived. Because when I went to Locust Ridge, it was very powerful for me to be on that land.

I tried picking cotton to see what that was like. It's really hard and painful. I walked all around. I visited the cemetery. I talked to the people there. I talked to the living people there. Just being in a place you can just absorb so much. Like what plants grow there? What does it look like? What does the dirt look like? What does it feel like? What does it smell like? What kinds of birds do you see? And then that gives you a connection with people through time who were in that same place.

Heather Murphy: Yeah,

Annie Hartnett: Yeah, I can't believe I've become this family history nerd, but I have

Heather Murphy: It'll happen to everybody eventually. At least that's what I hope.

Annie Hartnett: Maybe so. It is definitely really enriching. And I have learned so much too from other people like you in listening to your podcast and other genealogists who have been doing this work for a long time.

Heather Murphy: Yeah, and I appreciate, and a lot of what this podcast is about is getting deeper beyond the dates. And the facts, how they show up on a piece of paper. But really trying to understand what those dates and facts mean. What does the story behind that, that your ancestors live, that your ancestors affected other people. To get more of that sense, like you were saying, of being in the place, to put yourself, whether it's actually physically going to the place or not, but to put yourself in that ancestor's persona, so to speak, from what you can learn from the records and really try to understand what it was like for them in their time and place.

Annie Hartnett: Yeah. I just wanna share one more thing, and it was one of the first things that brought me to tears in my research, because it helped me feel connected to one of the people I was researching, is a man named Samuel Drake, who was enslaved by my third great grandmother.

He did it runaway and escape in 1863. He did make it behind Union lines and he did enlist in the US Colored Troops. That's another great source of information by the way, is, military records. And I have his enlistment papers. Obviously most enslaved people didn't learn to read or write. It was actually against the law and punishable by one year in prison to teach someone to read or write in Louisiana at that time, to teach a black person to read or write. But on his enlistment papers, he was required to sign his name and the way he did it, it wasn't just an X. He drew or wrote three crosses just as you imagine, three crosses on go Golgotha with Christ in the center, and seeing the pen strokes, the ink, the width of the ink, the pressure he applied and the mark that he chose to make just really touched me and, um, I felt like it it helped me understand him a little better. I don't know what his, what symbol he was making, you know, I don't know if he was Christian at all. I don't know if that meant the same thing to him that it means to me, but it was very powerful to see his own writing. And that's, you know, something that's very rare when you're researching enslaved people. You often don't get to read anything they've written, to see anything they've drawn or made by their own hands. Although you can find thumbprints and fingerprints and handprints in bricks and other things that they made, as a way that they left their mark because they built this country. Literally, and they did leave marks. And if you know where to look, you can see them. And I find that so touching and beautiful.

Heather Murphy: Well, thank you so much, Annie, for sharing your experiences here with me.

Annie Hartnett: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, and I look forward to listening to more of your podcast episodes.

Heather Murphy: Thanks so much.