Earlier this year, as she and her spouse piled into their Hyundai Tucson and prepared to travel the American South seeking answers about the ancestors she knew had been enslaved, Michelle Johnson found other questions suddenly on her mind.
Am I deluding myself, she wondered? Will I actually find anyone? Is this really that important?
“I just had to let go and say, let’s go for it and see what happens,” the retired Boston professor said. “I had some trepidation. But look how it paid off.”
Johnson’s long journey through family keepsakes, official documents and ultimately the land where her ancestors once toiled illustrates both the complex challenges and rewards for Black Americans, logistically and emotionally, in pursuing their genealogical histories.
In the past, the thought of digging into her family history had never occurred to Johnson, who’d taught journalism at Boston University. An heirloom family Bible offered names and family rumors swirled around other details, but she harbored little hope of finding much more.
“We all knew that as African Americans that our records are spotty,” she said. “There’s this thing called slavery that gets in the way of going down any serious rabbit holes.”
Michelle Johnson, professor emerita of journalism at Boston University, holds a photo of her great-great-grandfather Simon Peak in Glenn Springs, S.C., where according to 1870 census records Peak briefly lived as an adolescent, in April 2024. Johnson and spouse Myrna Greenfield drove from Boston to North and South Carolina in search of genealogical information about Johnson’s mother’s side of the family.
Prior to 1870’s post-emancipation census, enslaved individuals were often listed only by their first names, gender and age.
“To put it in a nutshell, you’re looking for people listed as property rather than as people,” said Hollis Gentry, a genealogy information specialist for the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C. “African American lives were valued according to how much they could produce as laborers.”
As a result, Black Americans are required not only to research their own families but those who enslaved them, Gentry said.
Ric Murphy, president general of the Society of the First African Families of English America, a heritage society based in Palmyra, Virginia, said those potential roadblocks have discouraged many from delving into their family histories.
“However, as new documents are surfacing because people are now learning to do genealogical searches, the brick wall of 1870 has been shattered,” Murphy said. “A lot of obstacles were put in our way, but we’re becoming very sophisticated in navigating the genealogical land mines that are out there. It’s so much harder for us, but also more rewarding as well.”
Johnson, 68, had signed up for an Ancestry.com account, intrigued by family stories and photos supplied by her mother, Doris Yarborough Johnson. Realizing there were gaps in the story that couldn’t be filled by just searching databases, she was inspired to act after watching episodes of “Finding Your Roots,” the PBS show hosted by Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Dr. Henry Louis Gates of “Finding Your Roots” speaks during the PBS segment of the Summer 2019 Television Critics Association Press Tour 2019 at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on July 29, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California.
“I had this sense that there was information locked up in libraries or maybe some church records, that there was probably stuff I was missing,” she said. “That was the big impetus for this trip, to break out of the digital space and just go down and see if I could find documents that hadn’t been digitized.”
She decided to travel South.
The experience, Johnson said, was significant not only on a personal level but on a broader one as well.
“It confirmed that Black history is American history,” she said. “There are people who want to separate it out and make it all about the Founding Fathers, but there’s history that predates all of us in this country, and the history of African Americans being enslaved and how they survived and excelled in the years after. … It just taught me about resilience and that the American dream exists in a number of ways.”
A journey to the past begins
Johnson and spouse Myrna Greenfield left Boston in April on a journey that would see them wander old graveyards and get tailgated by impatient locals on two-lane backroads in search of four family names: Yarborough, Peaks, Turner and Mills.
“This wasn’t just a road trip,” she wrote in a narrative she compiled about her journey. “It was a pilgrimage into the heart of my family’s history.”
A collage of photos showing Michelle Johnson and spouse Myrna Greenfield embarking on their trip from Boston to South Carolina and North Carolina in search of genealogical information about Johnson’s maternal side of the family, from a narrative report Johnson ultimately produced about their findings. Johnson, a retired journalism professor at Boston University, was inspired to make the trip after watching the PBS show, “Finding Your Roots.”
Johnson mostly hoped to find where her mother’s family members were from, maybe even the plantations they had worked on. She was curious about her mother’s Scotch-Irish maiden name of Yarborough and had been aware of census records listing some family members as mulatto.
“I knew from my grandmother telling me stories about the slave owner slipping down to the slave quarters that we had sides of our family who could pretty much pass for white,” she told USA TODAY. “But we didn’t know who they were or where that had happened.”
Her search had become more than just a hobby. She needed to understand, as so many others do, her place in the world and those whose lives had paved the way for her own success.
For Black Americans, she wrote, such searches can be fraught with complexities, with family histories “inextricably intertwined with the painful legacy of slavery, the struggles of Reconstruction and the ongoing fight for equality and justice.”
Johnson had two destinations in mind. Her mother had shared fond memories of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she’d lived as a young girl, and of Spartanburg, South Carolina, where she’d been born and spent summers with her grandparents.
Librarians in both places were more helpful than she could have imagined. When she visited Spartanburg, a local librarian had pulled materials in advance, with books and computer printouts on a table awaiting her arrival.
“I dropped my jaw when we walked up and she showed us what she’d found,” Johnson said. “Not only was there a fair amount of material on us, but she explained that was because my family was owned by one of the biggest plantation and slave owners in the county.”
In Spartanburg, S.C., librarian Christen Bennett, at left, shows retired Boston University professor Michelle Johnson materials detailing some of Johnson’s maternal family history. Johnson was inspired to travel from Boston to South and North Carolina doing genealogical research after watching episodes of the PBS show, “Finding Your Roots.”
That individual, she learned, was Govan Mills, who according to an 1850 “slave schedule” owned more than 100 slaves in North Carolina and South Carolina.
“Records for the white side are always voluminous because they had to file taxes, slave schedules and records of real estate sales and purchases,” Johnson said. “I about passed out. I had been looking for this information for years, and all of a sudden there it was right in front of me.”
She and Greenfield started highlighting printouts and taking photos of pages from non-circulated books that detailed bits of her family history. Johnson learned slaves were used not just as labor but as collateral to purchase land and goods, with two individuals she believed to be Jerry and Myra Mills, her great-great-grandparents, listed by their first names in those 1850 records.
Discovering lived truths prompts mix of emotions
Unearthing the lived truths of one’s ancestors, especially those affected by enslavement, can unleash a variety of emotions, the Smithsonian’s Gentry said.
“You get the whole gamut, from ecstasy and joy to sorrow and grief,” she said. “It’s like, ‘I found them,’ and there’s joy in that. Then there’s the grief of realizing, they had a monetary value and were treated in a certain manner. … It’s sad when you realize the implications of that information.”
While Johnson had had years to accept the idea that her ancestors had been enslaved, to see their status officially documented was jarring.
She learned the grand home where Govan Mills once lived not only still stood just across the border in Tryon, North Carolina, but was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. She unearthed an online invitation to a recent event that provided directions to the site.
A family photo of Myra Mills, the great-great-grandmother of retired Boston University professor Michelle Johnson. Johnson, who traveled to South Carolina and North Carolina in April 2024 to research her family history, said Mills and her husband Jerry were born into slavery and was able to locate the house in Tryon, N.C., where their slave owner once lived.
She and Greenfield drove there, hoping to find the house and snap a quick picture in front, with Johnson holding a photo of her great-great-grandmother. Instead, they encountered the home’s current residents, a white couple who invited them in for beverages and a tour, the four of them discussing art, history and genealogy – a scenario that would have been beyond Jerry and Myra Mills‘ wildest imaginings.
Before seeing Johnson and Greenfield off and inviting them to return, Jeff and Sherry Carter showed them the former kitchen and slave quarters behind the home, as well as the will that Govan Mills had left in 1862 valuing Jerry and Myra Mills and their two children at $2,700 ‒ about $8 million in today’s dollars.
“They had taken the slave cabin and pieced it together with this old kitchen and use it as a guesthouse now,” Johnson said. “There was a ladder leaning up against it and they told us the enslaved persons working there would have used it to up to the second level. … I wondered if any of my relatives would have been there. Would they have worked in that kitchen? To be in that space where some of them might have been was really moving.”
Census records from 1870 showed Jerry and Myra Mills stayed in the Spartanburg area post-emancipation, where they legalized their marriage in 1866 – a right not allowed them when they were enslaved. By 1900, Myra was listed as a widow, and her 1916 death record listed the cause as cancer, her parents and birthplace unknown.
The Mills’ lives spanned two major American historical periods, the antebellum South and the post-Civil War era. Their twice-widowed daughter Susan, meanwhile, would continue the family line from Reconstruction to the early Civil Rights Movement, her two marriages looping in the family names of Turner and Peak.
Because South Carolina kept no official records before 1911, Johnson said, no record existed of Susan’s marriage to Andy Turner, estimated by Ancestry.com to have occurred around 1893. By 1920, however, records showed she was married to farmer Simon Peak, a former slave who grew up during the Civil War.
A page from an early 1930s-era yearbook of former Atkins High School in Winston-Salem, N.C., shows Dowd Yarborough Jr. at bottom. Yarborough was the maternal grandfather of Michelle Johnson, a retired Boston University professor inspired to dig into her family history and travel to North Carolina and South Carolina to research her mother’s side of the family.
Those same records showed 9-year-old Annie Mae, Johnson’s grandmother, among the children listed in the Peak household. The Peaks would relocate to Winston-Salem between 1930 and 1937.
Meanwhile, Annie Mae Peak would marry Dowd Yarborough in 1935, the couple eventually moving to Baltimore. While Dowd perished under mysterious circumstances, Annie Mae persevered with just a grade-school education, pushing her three children to succeed, with Johnson’s mother and uncle earning advanced degrees from historically Black universities.
‘The ancestors will speak to you’
The trip far exceeded Johnson’s expectations, and as she and Greenfield began their trip back to Boston, Johnson suggested a slight detour to rural Franklinton, North Carolina, where a death certificate had told her a member of the Yarborough family had been buried.
The two wandered a local cemetery once set aside for nonwhites and found several Yarboroughs, but none matched the names from Johnson’s research. Instead, they stopped for lunch, where their waitress asked what had brought them to town, chuckling when she heard they were seeking Yarboroughs; the area was full of them.
The waitress suggested heading to a nearby small town called Oxford, which had a genealogy room.
There, a librarian led them to county directories with family narratives in alphabetical order. When Johnson flipped to the ‘Y’ section, she discovered a page featuring many of the names she’d encountered in her research, with more stories indicating slave roots and noting “all members of this branch of Yarboroughs were/are all mulattos.”
A page from a library collection of family histories detailing the Yarborough family in a region north of Raleigh. Retired journalism professor Michelle Johnson came across the book at an Oxford, N.C., library while researching her family genealogy in April 2024. Yarborough was her mother’s maiden name.
The whole detour had been by chance – or had it? The librarian felt otherwise, saying that when people visited the genealogy room they often said they felt guided by ancestors.
Johnson had to agree.
“We would have completely missed this had I not stopped there,” Johnson said. “It was a hell of a way to end the trip.”
Murphy, of the heritage society, said Johnson’s experience echoes those he’s heard from others who have made that emotional journey.
“I tell people all the time that once you start genealogy, the ancestors will speak to you,” he said. “They will often tell you where to look and whether a piece of paper is important enough. The ancestors are very restless, and almost everyone will say the ancestors guided them.”
Honoring memory, forging identity
While more than 400 heritage societies operate in the U.S., few specialize in verifying the histories of people descending from those once enslaved, Gentry said.
Johnson knows she isn’t a professional genealogist and eventually hopes to have her findings certified. In the meantime, though, she still hopes to research her father’s side of the family.
A collage of photos taken in April 2024 by retired Boston University professor Michelle Johnson of the home where former slave owner Govan Mills lived in Tryon, N.C.. Johnson, 68, traveled to North and South Carolina to research her maternal family history, discovering that Mills had owned Jerry and Myra, Johnson’s great-great-grandparents, as slaves. She ended up meeting the home’s current owners, who toured her around the house and former slave quarters.
She’s shared copies of her narrative with her family so younger generations can pass it on to their kids.
“In doing so,” she wrote, “we not only honor their memory but also forge a stronger sense of our own identity.”
Johnson said Black Americans daunted by the task of researching their own family trees should start small. Tools now available have made it much easier, she said, especially as companies like Ancestry.com incorporate the power of artificial intelligence.
Such advances have inspired new waves of amateur and professional researchers, in the way that author Alex Haley’s 1976 novel “Roots” sparked an interest in documenting Black American genealogy with the resources at hand.
“Genealogical research has been democratized,” Gentry said.
Reclaiming those stories, Johnson said, is critical given recent movements to whitewash American history.
“I hope that folks make sure it continues to be taught in our educational institutions, but if it doesn’t, we will do what the ancestors did,” she said. “We will tell our own stories.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Family genealogy: For Black Americans, search offers trials, rewards
