Wow. What a weekend!
The first thing: Meeting my Neals
As many of my readers know,
I've been researching my YARBOROUGH line for almost 25 years. The targeted
ancestor for this line has been my great-grandfather, Calvin Yarborough, who
was born in or around 1840 and died between 1910-1913. Calvin lived in Louisburg,
North Carolina. He and my great-grandmother, Precilla, were both enslaved.
Together, they had 11 (known) children. To read more about Calvin, click here.
For over 4 years, I have been
giving a presentation called, "Finding Calvin: Following My Enslaved
Ancestor Through Multiple Owners." In this talk, which is actually
a case study, I demonstrate how I determined that Calvin was, indeed, enslaved
and I share the process and methodology used to uncover his ties to four
different enslavers. And, though I hadn't been able to find records leading me
to Calvin's family of origin, which I was sure he'd been separated from, I had
one tiny tidbit of family lore, shared with me by my father's sister, the only
close Yarborough relative still living at the time I began this work. What my
Aunt Sue told me was this: "We
were supposed to be Neals, not Yarboroughs."
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| Susie Yarborough Hawkins (1920-2013) |
Since discovering my
great-grandfather's four enslavers, I've continued the work of researching each
of them, as well as their family members, looking for any information relevant
to Calvin - anything that might lead me to the names of his parents and/or any
siblings. Unfortunately, I came across no revealing records in which family
relationships were noted. So, in the Spring of 2020, bored at home in isolation
because of a global pandemic, I made the decision to plunge more deeply into
working with some of my DNA matches to see if I might be able to figure out how
we are connected. I'd been spending hours and hours in webinars and reading
blog posts about strategies for working with DNA matches, so it was time to up
my game and put some (more) of what I’d been learning into practice.
My first goal was to try to
determine the family line of a set of matches that were matching each other but
were not connecting to any known relatives of mine. The main reason for this
was that these matches were on Ancestry DNA, where the fewest of my relatives had
tested, being that I had obtained most of their samples before 2012, when
Ancestry began implementing autosomal testing. Even for the couple of years
after that, I still mostly used 23&Me and FTDNA for my testing needs, not
knowing that Ancestry would become the “popular choice” and gain such a large
database of testees so quickly. Because of this, though all of my lines are
represented on at least two of the other main sites (to include MyHeritage and
Gedmatch, which allow uploads from the other companies), I am not able to
immediately identify all of my matches on Ancestry by using the Shared Matches
feature on their site. And, since many of these matches have been unresponsive
to messaging and/or unwilling to upload to other sites, I’ve been left with few
other options but to do the work of researching their lines and building out
trees for them, myself. And, so I began, in the Spring of 2020 – and in so
doing, I began to see a common thread in the first few trees I successfully built
out; each of these matches had a NEAL line!
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| Sanders, Renate Yarborough. “We Were Supposed to be NEALS: Reconstructing an Enslaved Family Using DNA,” Slide No. 31: Accessed 11/1/2021) |
As you can see, I was able to work the trees of these five matches to three Neal ancestors, Wiley Perry, Lee Ernest, and Louis Napoleon Neal. Thanks to the one person who had a tree, I learned that the parents of all of these men were James NEAL and Angeline Jackson. With this revelation, and excited by what it may have meant, I fervently began reaching out to these matches – and also to many of the others for whom I’d not yet been able to fully build out a tree. Some responded, some didn’t. But, regardless, I was able to move forward because of the tree work I’d done and the research bounty that resulted from it. My initial thought, that perhaps James Neal was Calvin’s father, was quickly squashed when I learned that James was born in 1846 – six years after Calvin. Because of the range in the amount of DNA I was sharing with the 15-20 matches in this group (at that time), it became clear to me that James was more likely a sibling of Calvin’s. Realizing that, my next goal became to find out who James’ parents were – presuming that either one or both of them would be Calvin’s parents, too.
And so the work continued. I did
find James’ parents – Lewis and Mary Neal – my presumed great-great-grandparents.
I do suspect, though, that perhaps Mary was not Calvin’s mother, because
records are confirming my long-held suspicion that Calvin was separated from
his parents and most immediate family. I will write more about that in a future
post. Nevertheless, until I find differently, I will count both Lewis and Mary
as Calvin’s parents. I’ve also found several other children of Lewis and Mary
Neal – the siblings (half or whole) that were all together with their parents with
their enslaver, John Neal, Jr., son of Calvin’s first owner, Chloe Crudup Perry
Neal, as evidenced by an 1862 inventory, found in John Neal, Jr.’s estate
papers. As a result of this research, I’ve been able to connect with some of
the descendants of Lewis and Mary Neal, and have been in conversation with one,
in particular, my cousin Willard Neal, of Bear Creek, North Carolina. And,
thanks to Cousin Willard, descendants of Lewis and Mary’s once separated offspring –
Calvin and James – were together this past Friday, for the first time, meeting at the home of
Willard’s sister, Jackie, in Pittsboro, NC. That’s right, folks, I met some of
my Neal family, for the very first time! This loving reunion was made even more special
because I was accompanied by my daughter, Natalia, and granddaughter, Teigan.
In all, we represented 4 generations of the descendants of Lewis and Mary Neal! (And I am the furthest generation back of all of us!)
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| NEAL descendants - Reunited and it feels so good! (Cousin Willard is standing front, right - with the plaid shirt.) |
This is just a light summary of the work I did to recover Calvin's family. I tell the entire story, share my research process, and discuss my hypotheses and theories in my new presentation, “We Were Supposed to be NEALS; Reconstructing an Enslaved Family Using DNA,” which debuted this past weekend at the North Carolina Genealogical Society’s Fall Conference, in Raleigh. That brings me to…
… The second thing: My first in-person presentation, since
February 2020, due to the Covid 19 Global Pandemic!
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| Here I am, about to speak, at the NCGS Fall Conference 2021. Photo Credit: Connie Knox |
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| View of the room from the podium. No one was anywhere near me. |
