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Kelley Dixon-Tealer: Connecting with her enslaved great-great-great grandfather.
For most American descendants of slaves, their ancestral search ends abruptly at slavery, for few details of slave lives were kept, and few slaves could read and write.
But 48-year-old Kelley and her mother Marie Jenkins, both of Houston, had a dream come true.
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With the help of Ancestry genealogist Nicka Sewell-Smith, they located the Freedmen's Bureau, an agency set-up by Congress after the Civil War.
It helped ex-slaves locate family members, legalize marriages and buy land. Although the Bureau closed in 1872, its records are stored at the National Archives.
Photo from "A Dream Delivered: The Lost Letters of Hawkins Wilson photo: theskanner.com
In pursuing their genealogical search through Ancestry, they found two letters written in 1867 from her great-great-great grandfather, Hawkins Wilson.
The first letter, written from his Galveston, Texas home begins, "Dear Sir, I am anxious to learn about my sisters, from whom I have been separated many years."
The second letter begins, "Dear Sister Jane, your little brother Hawkins is trying to find out where you are and where his poor old mother is."
And those letters had revelations: In them for example, they learned Mr. Wilson was born a slave in Virginia in 1837, and at age 6 was sold to a different slaveholder.
Mr. Wilson wrote of his wife, Martha White, whom he married in 1867, and that he earned $18 a month as a church officer and caretaker.
Meanwhile, in doing this ancestral research, Kelley located two distant female cousins in Virginia, and she and her mother are building a close relationship with them.
Kelley Dixon-Tealer, back right, and her mother, Marie Jenkins, back left, meet their distant cousins
photo: washingtonpost.com
"I'm just blown away," Kelley told The Washington Post.
"I spent my Juneteenth looking at my new family tree. To touch those names made me feel like I'd won the lottery."
Editor's Note: : Mr. Wilson lived until 1906.
To learn more, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/24/kelley-dixon-tealer-letters-enslaved/.
In the next KazanToday: The Chicago White Sox made a 7-year-old cancer patient's dream come true.
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