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I always knew something was wrong with the story.

When my mother described Great-Grandpa to me when I was a child, he seemed like a mythical hero — mysterious and larger than life. She spoke of him with admiration, but reluctantly, as if his story was a secret with which I was too young to be trusted. But young as I was, when I heard Mother talk about him, I knew something wasn’t right.

Her story went like this:

During the late 1800s in Little Orleans, a farming village hidden at the edge of Sideling Hill Creek amid the mountains of Western Maryland, a young man appeared. With no explanation of where he came from, he arrived one day and took his place among the Appalachian hill people there, drawing their curiosity because his complexion was a shade or so darker than theirs. He was a Spanish vagabond seeking prosperity in America, they speculated, or he was Portuguese. Maybe Italian.

He caught the attention of a prosperous local landowner and businessman, Mr. Thomas. Having no children of his own, Mr. Thomas took him in and regarded him as a son, allowing him to manage his farmland and mills. When Mr. Thomas died, he left his estate that young man, my great-grandfather.

A hardworking farmer and businessman, Great-Grandpa grew wealthy in his own right. He married a woman from a landowning family in the nearby town of Hancock and fathered eleven children. His descendants grew into a close-knit community in the stretch of bottomland known as Bell Grove.

No one knew where he came from, Mother said, but he established himself as a prominent citizen of Western Maryland. Our family, she declared proudly, originated with him.

“But what about his parents?” I asked. “He had to have parents. Who were they? And Great-Grandpa had to come from somewhere,” I reasoned. “Where?”

“Your great-grandpa was a good man, a successful man,” Mother told me. “He built a school and supported the church in Bell Grove. He loaned people money when they needed it. He took good care of his family. That’s all you need to know about him.”

“But . . .”

She interrupted. “Don’t ask questions. And don’t talk about this anymore.”

……….

Mother and her eight siblings grew up in Cumberland, Maryland, a few miles west of the area near Sideling Hill where Great-Grandpa once farmed. They were known for their good looks — blue-eyed blondes with twinkles in their eyes, freckled redheads, brunettes with creamy complexions. Children of the Depression, they made their way in the world. They worked hard, raised families — made Grandma and Grandpa proud.

Yet, they always seemed to be ashamed of something. Even as a child, I sensed it. Shame clung to them like the set-in tea stains on my grandma’s kitchen tablecloth. When we gathered around that table, I could feel it like a net over us — enveloping us like an extra layer of skin. At the head of the table, my grandpa sat in his wheelchair. From her seat nearest the stove, Grandma often stared at him with what looked like silent seething. I couldn’t help but suspect, young as I was, that Grandpa was somehow responsible for the family’s shame.

If a family is a tree, its members are branches that stretch up and out, away from the trunk, away from their origin. The branches strive outward, as if running away, as if to escape the main stem that gave them life. The trunk of the tree is fed by roots, a network of forebears whose stories lie buried, whose truths run deep below the surface. There, out of sight, deep down in the earth, are the roots.

And if a family is anything like mine, dogged by a shame no one talks about, likely there’s a root — an ancestor — who is the root of the problem.

When I was a child, I promised myself that someday I would learn the truth.

……….

Recently, I retired. And like many retirees, I decided to explore my genealogy. Was I Irish, as I had always been told? German on my father’s side? Did I have living relatives out there that I knew nothing about? Now that I had plenty of leisure time, I thought genealogy might be a good hobby.

During the years since Mother told me her story about Great-Grandpa, I grew up, left my Appalachian home, established a life for myself apart from the legacy of my grandparents, and all but forgot the shame that hunkered around the family. I didn’t give a thought to my mysterious ancestor and the questions surrounding him.

Until now.

Finding the truth was much easier than I expected.

Thanks to the resources available in the Ancestry and FamilySearch databases, I learned quickly that Great-Grandpa was, as Mother told me, a prosperous landowner, farmer, and miller in Bell Grove. His progeny blossomed into a village of people who bear his name.

But who were his parents? And where did he come from?

Among the many artifacts that survive regarding Great-Grandpa is a 1911 newspaper article with the headline Negro Tries to Marry White. It reports that a fifty-five-year-old widower, a man bearing his name, applied for a marriage license. Because he was, as the article stated, “colored” and his intended bride was white, the license was denied.

When I read the headline, I was shocked. I shouldn’t have been, though. I should have figured it out long ago. But I was so caught up in the family myth that I didn’t suspect the truth.

The root of our family tree — our patriarch — was indeed the root of the problem.

That newspaper article was the clue that led to my understanding. I started searching census reports from the late-1800s and early-1900s and discovered that Great-Grandpa’s race was sometimes reported as “Mulatto” and other times as “White.” The reports also indicated that he was born in Little Orleans, Maryland. He was never a stranger who arrived mysteriously in the region.

Further research allowed me to piece together my great-grandfather’s real story. He was born a slave in 1855 on the farm of Mr. Thomas, who was his biological father. His mother was a slave that Mr. Thomas owned at the time. After Emancipation, he remained on the farm. Mr. Thomas may have acknowledged him privately, but certainly not publicly, as his son. In 1879, he married a white woman, my great-grandmother, seemingly with no resistance from the state. Later, after his first wife died, he was denied a license to marry a second white woman in Maryland, but was granted the license just a few miles north in Pennsylvania.

All of this information was fascinating to me, but would it stand up to science?

I had several DNA analyses completed to find out. As a result, I learned that while my ethnic origins are predominantly European, my ancestry is also traceable to the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, and Togo. This fact confirms for me that my mysterious great-grandfather wasn’t Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian; he was a bi-racial person — partly African. I also discovered that I am a genetic match to descendants of Mr. Thomas’s siblings, which substantiates that he was Great-Grandpa’s biological father.

The patriarch of our family was an African-American man who began life as a slave. Mother and her siblings must have known that, and they must have done their best to hide it. They didn’t want their children to know.

When my grandmother glared at my grandfather across the kitchen table when I was a child, she may have been blaming him, the son of a former slave, for making her children vulnerable to the dangers that accompanied the racial stigma of the time.

……….

I have always been perceived as white. Growing up, I lived in three different segregated Southern states in white neighborhoods and attended all-white schools. I benefited from the privileges, unfair as they were, afforded to those with European ancestry. Though I inherited DNA associated with African ancestry from my great-grandfather, I never suffered the prejudice, discrimination, or violence associated with being African-American during the long aftermath of the Civil War.

I was lucky.

I don’t believe that my mother and her siblings were racists — at least, no more than any of the people of their generation living in Southern states in the U.S. They didn’t hide Great-Grandpa’s racial identity because they believed it made him inferior to the white people in Western Maryland. They hid it out of fear. Fear of what might happen to them and their children if their bi-racial heritage were revealed.

When I finally understood the truth about Great-Grandpa, I felt immeasurable admiration. Born into perilous circumstances — a slave, and a slaveholder’s son — he grew up to be prosperous and successful, a respected leader in a community that he, himself, founded. He was able to cope with and, to some extent, overcome the racism that surrounded him. In my estimation, he remains a larger-than-life hero.

Since I made my discovery, I have located and met a few of my second-cousins — family members of my generation who grew up in Bell Grove in the community our great-grandfather established. They have shared with me some of the oral history that circulated within the family about the man who is our patriarch. Some questions remain about him. He is still somewhat of a mystery. But we have brought to light what was once a guarded secret.

Of her childhood in Bell Grove, one of my second-cousins recalls, “We were told never to talk about Great-Grandpa’s origins. We were ashamed.”

Now, years later, she says she feels differently. “I’m not ashamed anymore,” she says. “I am proud of who I am.”

I, too, am proud.

Cover Image by Silver Screen at Pexels