June 2013: My mother’s family goes back to a complicated, multi-branched web of Virginia families that began grabbing land and then people when Jamestown was founded. I knew even as a small child that my ancestors owned people, and I imagined that I was related to some of those people. I also knew it wasn’t a topic to talk about with the grown ups. Much later, when the controversy within the Jefferson-Randolph-Eppes families got hot and nasty, in 1999/2000/2001, I was moved to take action. I built relationships with people descended from Elizabeth Hemings, Sally Hemings’ mother, and have been active in family reunions, Monticello events, and Coming to the Table ever since. I’m delighted to be connected with this group, initially to be assembling this blog, which I couldn’t have done by myself, for sure, and to develop other resources and activities.

October 2013: In a cemetery in the Mississippi bayou, my ancestors are laid to rest, the white ones atop a hill, overlooking the black ones that they owned. I first learned about these ancestors when I was twelve and asked my fair-skinned grandfather if he was white. I’ve tried to uncover their story ever since – repeatedly traveling to my ancestral homes in Louisiana and Mississippi, conducting hours of interviews, retracing the path of my people, trying to find out who we were. I discovered that we were slaves and senators, preachers and plantation owners, and a few were even writers – a passion that I inherited. I also discovered my living history – a third cousin once removed who like me lives in New Jersey and yearns to know our family history and even descendants of the family that owned my great, great-grandmother, Tempe. Together, we have recovered our common history. You can read about my experience with my linked descendants here: www.dionneford.com.

June 2013: I am a filmmaker, historic preservationist, amateur historian, researcher and genealogist, poet and art collector—and a descendant of slave owners from South Carolina on both sides of my family. I have lived in Boulder, CO now for thirty years. In response to research I did about my ancestors on my mother’s side and African Americans linked to us through slavery, I produced and directed the PBS documentary film, Shared History. The magnitude of knowing my family owned African Americans or African people is too despicable to dwell on without the help of others; so I work though Coming to the Table to grieve my family’s role in devastating lives—devastation that continues today—and little by little face my responsibility to acknowledge my past and take action with others to address the wrongs. My hope is by active example and encouragement, other descendants of slave owners will step forward, open their archives to the descendants of people who their families owned and find the power to offer love and healing toward reconciliation.

When I was 12, my sister was exposed to tuberculosis, which meant that everyone in our household, including “the help,” had to be tested. Luvenia Duckett, who cooked for my family, didn’t have a doctor, so she went with us to our appointment. When we got out of the car, my mother pointed to the side door. Luvenia started walking in that direction but I took her hand and said, “No, the [front] door is this way.” My mother said that Luvenia had to go in the side door. I bowed my head and began to cry. When it was my turn to see the nurse, I passed Luvenia sitting in one of the patient rooms. I felt a wave of humiliation come over me when I looked at her and realized that Luvenia, who cooked our food and was my friend, was being treated differently—second class—because she was black. This incident changed my life forever.

I had always known we owned slaves. When I was a child, each summer and fall, my grandmother took me, my sisters, and all of my first cousins to Woodlands, the plantation we still owned that had been nearly burned to the ground during Sherman’s march inland through South Carolina. When we arrived, a dignified black man named Jim Rumph was waiting for us. He wore a suit and hat. He had opened the house, laid the fires and removed the cobwebs. Jim was the caretaker of Woodlands and the grandson of the first Jim Rumph who was the slave foreman at Woodlands. Jim Rumph’s father, also named Jim Rumph, had been the caretaker of Woodlands in the first part of the 20th century.

My grandmother treated Jim Rumph with a respect that she did not show to other blacks, except her housekeeper, Llewellyn, who had been “sent up” from the plantation to work in my grandmother’s home 300 miles away.

Other African Americans came over to the place to cook, clean and take care of us. They were all descended from the enslaved people at Woodlands, which numbered about 40 people at the end of the Civil War. Through reconstruction, Jim Crow, sharecropping, migration and the Civil Rights movement, we continued to know and depend on each other through a paternalistic system that I still seem to participate in today.

In an earlier time, my grandmother and other family members would drive the many miles from where they lived to attend the funerals of these descendants. My family was always seated in the first row. My grandmother, a writer and historian, would stand and speak eloquently about the deceased—how our family suffered the loss as much as the black family did and how our families had always been “together.”

When I was forty, I realized I knew nothing about African American experience so I took a class called African American Family at the University of Colorado. It was then that I realized that it was probably remarkable that I still had contact with the descendants of people my family had owned in the 18th and 19th century. As I studied more about African American history and slavery, I became transfixed and transformed by the realities of this long-term relationship forged through generations of slavery. I realized that the relationship would probably end soon—its members scattered too far and wide, the old people dying, and perhaps because the young people do not want its archaic presence in their lives.

Soon after the class was over, I called Dorothy Manigault, the daughter of Mudd, who had taken care of us as children when we were visiting Woodlands, and asked her if she would help me document our history. I traveled to SC, bought a video camera, and began shooting oral histories of members of both our families. Charles Orr and Rhonda Kearse, descendants of two different families from Woodlands, found Shared History on the web, and we joined forces to explore this history together. I gathered genealogical information about the black families. Most only knew their grandparents’ names. In looking through my grandmother’s files, I found photographs of their ancestors that they had never seen before, along with plantation documents and a series of letters between my family and theirs—from 1915 to 1980. The stories and interviews eventually became a film—Shared History—a website, and a blog. Oddly, whether I like it or not, I have now become the keeper of their families’ history.

Like my long ago deceased grandmother, I sit on the front row when I attend their church, make donations for memorials, and provide other support to certain people. Before the film was broadcast, my family endowed a college scholarship fund for the descendants of the enslaved of Woodlands Plantation. (“Hey, let’s quickly make amends!”

I am particularly close with Dorothy Manigault who made it possible for me to connect with people in her family and help me gain their trust. She has recently had a debilitating stroke. She and I may be the last to care about our linked family relationship, that now has the seeds for equality, but she can no longer speak.

Recently, I have begun researching the other side of my family. They were Baptist ministers who wrote about the benefits of slavery and founded Furman University in Greenville, SC, my hometown. I will write an article exposing my family’s and the university’s relationship with slavery. It’s time for them to own-up. One more little step.

UPDATE: In the summer of 2017, Hardesty submitted for peer review the 60-page text, A. Tribble, T. Jefferson: Men’s Opinions and Beliefs Depend Not on Their Own Will. Back cover blurb, right.

June 2013: Among family, I'm referred to as Dave. I present myself as a blend of media producer, writer, amateur genealogist and advocate for racial justice. In March 2011, I added Ardis Ligon to my concept of family, as it is exceedingly likely that I am related to the great-granddaughter of Jeremiah Turner (1840-1917) by way of my 3x great-grandfather, 'Trading Tom' Turner (1764-1847). We have established that Jeremiah was the property of Thomas Turner's son, noted pro-slavery jurist Squire Turner (1793-1871) and have set ourselves the task of verifying Ardis' family lore ... that Jeremiah was the product of a relationship between a slave and either Squire or his father Thomas. Through emails and then phone conversations, Ardis helped me adjust to a new, disturbing awareness that ... before it happened to me, I’d never contemplated: though family history stories included accounts of 'Uncle' Dave and 'Aunt' Mary; tales of slave times were not passed to me.

Ardis and I met in person that summer and have become very close. I'm quite grateful for the opportunity. Someone suggested others were dealing with coming into such relationship, and I was pointed to Coming to the Table.

In September, 2011 I began Hard Honesty, a blog arising from my family history research. In a daring account from the environs of Boonesborough in 1782, I discovered 'Uncle' Monk (slave-named Estill, died 1835) saved the life of an ancestor. As Squire Turner (above) sought to enshrine slavery in a re-write of the Kentucky State Constitution in 1849, his half-brother, my 2x great-grandfather, sought to elect emancipationist delegates to the convention.

I began moving into racial justice work in earnest, forming a consultancy with my then-wife, the Hon. JoAnn Hardesty (nee Bowman), a civil rights leader of some renown. I now operate out of hardspace. I am more aware of white privilege & pervasive injustice than I – a liberal – had ever before been. It's a loaded term, but I am considered by some to be a “white ally.”

I think I’ll enjoy launching BitterSweet, as a result of the value I place on long-form journalism. Ultimately, I’m excited about this project because I believe intimacy derived from this community can help dismantle unintentional & passive racism which afflicts people of color in ways whites barely realize … but can be severe and unrelenting to victims. I know there to be a migration - through ancestry.com - of recreational genealogists who are now aware their ancestors owned slaves. I believe we can particularly assist those who have become 'linked descendants' ... those who've established relationships with the progeny of their ancestor's slaves or owners. Real-world, real-time reconciliation between related descendants, in such a fishbowl, can be a marvelous example … as well as an environment for related descendants to grow and be read. Our job, it seems, is to facilitate these comings-together in ways that make intended outcomes most likely.

I look forward to hearing from you. I'm particularly keen to make contact with those who have information on Monk Estill or Squire Turner. http://en.gravatar.com/rdhardesty

June 2013: I'm a biographer specializing in the lives of extraordinary women, and there's a reason why I am drawn so strongly to my subject: I was surrounded from birth by strong women extraordinary in their own individual ways, my mother and grandmother in particular. My grandmother descended from slave holders in the South and in New England, and knew enough about that period of her family's history to be ashamed of it and yet keen to know what had happened to the people her people had held in bondage. My mother, too, was keen to know this. My grandmother died in 2001, ten years before I joined CTTT, but my mother, who died last December, was able to celebrate with me my meeting with linked descendants in Norwich, CT last spring and my stay with Joseph McGill, Dionne Ford Kurtti, and David Pettee in the slave quarters of Bush-Holley House in Greenwich. She was not able to partake of my discovery earlier this spring, through the auspices of 23andMe, several African American cousins scattered throughout the US, one of them linking my white family to the greatness of Daisy Bates of the Little Rock Nine. But how happy she would have been, as I am happy to know my cousins and to be welcomed by them into their families. I have long considered the possibility of a book around these discoveries - one of my cousins, the link to Daisy Bates, and one of my linked descendants (through Guy Drock of eighteenth century Norwich, CT) are helping me think it through in ways I had not considered. If a book comes out of this, it will be more through them than through me, as it should be!

I am involved in this group not just because I am actively seeking linked descendants from my family's history of slavery, which stretches back almost three hundred years in North America, but also because of my work to reconstruct the histories of my African American cousins, whose history was suppressed, even as they themselves were oppressed, by my well-documented ancestors South and North. Though I have much more to learn, and sometimes wonder if this lifetime is life enough in which to learn it all, I have gathered wisdom from my cousins linked and blood, and feel I could contribute a little not just to the examination of this painful shared history of ours but maybe help others who are in the same situation, white and black - wanting to know the details of a terrible past, without knowledge of which we cannot be completely whole. Nor, lacking that knowledge, can social justice reach its fullest possible arc. Part of the research for my book will take me into Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and force me to walk ground worked by slaves - and for someone like myself, who couldn't bring himself on his last visit to the Atlanta area even to drive out to a famous plantation, Bulloch Hall, because it was built by slaves and he feared hearing the voices of the suffering out of every stone, decided to stay far, far away. I cannot do that. There is a line from Rebecca West's early novel, "The Return of the Soldier", that I think of when I recoil from what I think I can't face:

"Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draft that we must drink or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is an adult one must raise to one’s lips the wine of truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality, or else walk forever queer and small like a dwarf."

May 2014: I love family. My two sons are part of my reason for doing this research. Growing up, my Dad, George Jerry Turner (1920-2001) would tell my brothers and I about our great-grandfather Jeremiah (Jery) Turner (1840-1917). Jeremiah was a slave, and the son of the slave master Squire Turner (1793-1871), a prominent, pro-slavery lawyer in Richmond, Madison County, KY.

This is the story we were told:

"Jeremiah Turner is your great-grandfather. Jeremiah's grandmother escaped from her master and disappeared in to the Florida Everglades. At the time, the Seminole Indians inhabited that area and would hide the runaway slaves. When the master found his runaway female, she was pregnant by a Seminole Indian. She gave birth to a daughter, who in later years was pregnant either by the slave master or the slave master's son, Squire Turner. The baby born was Jeremiah Turner, my grandfather.”

“Jeremiah fought in the Civil War and gained his freedom for his service.”

I became interested in genealogy in the mid 90’s. My curiosity led to many long hours on my computer. After thoroughly searching the National Archives' website, I then went to Washington, D.C. to collect Civil War records on my Turner family. I am still amazed, that I actually had the whole original Civil War Pension File for Jeremiah Turner in my hands at the Archives. I now have copies of those files at my home in Cincinnati.

I had been posting to every genealogy message board I could find. In 2011, I received a call from a Dave Hardesty. He had seen one of my posts pertaining to Jeremiah and Squire Turner. I was so excited to hear Dave’s message! His was the first response to my post about the relationship of my great-grandfather Jeremiah Turner, a slave, and Squire Turner, his owner/father.

I immediately returned Dave’s call and I am sure the conversation lasted several hours. Dave and I exchanged a great deal of information. We began a new journey as cousins. In the summer of 2012, Dave and his wife Jo Ann came to Ohio to meet me. I can not tell you how happy or excited I was! My wish would have been that my Dad was still with us … to witness his stories come to life.

Dave and I have become very close and keep in touch regularly. Through him, I was led to the ‘Coming To The Table’ group, and then here, to ‘BitterSweet.’ I joined CTTT, and I am excited that – finally – we can share what it’s like to connect with family members … descendants of our ancestors' slave owners. People are accepting the truth of our combined history.

Family research is not easy. It does not go in ABC order. In addition to Archery, Card Making, and Ceramics, I am also enrolled in a Genealogy class at Dunham Recreation Center. Instructor Robin Bonaventura has greatly guided me in my own family research journey. She has shown the class how to gather our information into a more workable state. Robin is also my Archery Instructor; she teaches us that Archery also takes a lot of focus, just like Genealogy, to accomplish your bigger goal.

I am now organized!! Scattered pieces of paper have been properly filed with the pertinent family member. Robin helped me focus and I have accomplished more then I ever thought possible. My two major family lines (Turner and Estill), each have a big binder, organized by name. Instead of taking a big binder to libraries, I have made small, calendar-planner books of sleeved, 5x7 cards that I can manage easily.

Our Genealogy class meets each Monday for 2 hours, and I continue to travel. We take road trips to libraries, historical societies and research centers.

As of this writing, I have participated in two call-in sessions with members of ‘BitterSweet.’ XX I am beginning to connect to others' slave/slave owner family relationships. Individual members bring a lot of insight in their journey on this new path. Our last call-in session was amazing. We were all brought to tears while listening to one lady's journey.

I am still very active in family history and breaking through the brick walls – not only in the Turner and Estill family – but also Phelps, Kennedy and Moore surnames. I have reason to believe I descend from Monk Estill (1700s-1835), the first slave freed in Kentucky,

Dave and I also share an interest in 'Uncle' Monk. Following the 1782 Battle of Little Mountain (or Estill’s Defeat), Monk carried a wounded James Berry twenty-five miles to safety near the stockade at Boonesborough. James Berry is Dave Hardesty's 4x great-grandfather.

“Monk Estill arrived in Kentucky in the 1770s as a slave and was later freed, the first freed slave in Kentucky. He made gunpowder at Boonesborough, KY. His son, Jerry, was the first African American born in Kentucky”.

-- For more see the Kentucky Encyclopedia, and The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians, by Dunigan.

September 2013: My journey is just beginning and I welcome you to join me as I look deep into my family’s history. My mother’s family settled on the Eastern Shore of Maryland (Dorchester County) in 1669. Family names included Applegarth, Keene, Tubman, Travers and Stapleford - to name a few. Oral tradition included tales of births and deaths, wealth and bankruptcy, success and failure, land bought and sold, and humorous family stories. But a few years ago I became acutely aware that the tales were one sided when I inherited a copy of our family history. Interspersed with marriages, births, and baptismal records I found records of slaves. Slaves listed in categories and numbers – male or female and age range – Under 14, 14 to 25, 26 to 44, 45 and up - no names, no information, no family connections listed. Slaves were never mentioned in our oral history. So, I have set out on a personal mission to research and try to identify as many names, uncover the stories and provide information about the people who were enslaved by my family. It is my hope to tell more of the story.

November 2013: Sharon Leslie Morgan moved to Noxubee County, Mississippi to research her ancestors’ history. Morgan’s great-great-grandmother, Betty Warfe Gavin, was enslaved there, and gave birth to 17 children. The father of all of them was Robert Louis Gavin, a white man and the nephew of her enslaver.

“My ancestors came from here and fled,” says Morgan. “For me to come back and reclaim memories, experiences, relationships, I think that is going to help with healing the historical harm of slavery.”

Morgan is a long-time Coming to the Table member, the founder of Our Black Ancestry, co-author, with Tom DeWolf, of Gather at the Table, and a partner in FamilySearch’s Reclaiming Our African Roots project.

“I want to honor them by saying their names,” explains Morgan. “They didn’t have a voice. They can’t speak for themselves. An African proverb says that you are not dead as long as someone says your name. I am that person.”

Both Morgan’s talk and her forthcoming book will give her ancestors a voice.

June 2013: You can call me Ann. I’m a still-not-fully-retired professor of an interdisciplinary kind of historical sociology of race and gender who always assigns family history projects to my students if at all justifiable. I have found that the experience of placing one’s family history in the larger social context of white supremacy, social class hierarchies, and patriarchal gender relations can lead to a critical consciousness, which, at its best, can bring about a commitment to work with others to make a better world. My intense focus on the legacies of enslavement/Jim Crow has a genealogy of its own, which is too lengthy to detail here but I’ll try for some highlights (and even this is too long!).

After spending the first 7 years of my life on the white side of a small Jim Crow town in Mid-Missouri, I moved with my family to California after “the War,” where I remained through college and graduate school – the latter in sociology at Berkeley in the notorious 60s. Although trained in social research, at Cal I discovered that teaching was definitely my calling with race relations a specialization. Also outside the classroom many of us learned much about the nature of power and challenging authority in those intense times -- becoming Friends of SNCC, participating in the Free Speech Movement, and raising our consciousness through Women’s Liberation.

In 1975 I was hired to coordinate Women Studies and teach Comparative Sociology at the University of Puget Sound. For my first sabbatical from UPS I chose to return to Missouri to do research on pioneer women in the region of Randolph County, the origins of my paternal grandmother. I was astounded to find myself face-to-face with slavery in county census and probate records, with some of my ancestors among the slaveholders!

I began my “linked descendants” work by tracing the life of Amanda, one of eleven enslaved people listed in my 3great grandfather’s probate record. Following her children’s records into the present, in 1990, I found a living descendant of Amanda’s named Mary Frances Berry, with whom I shared Amanda’s history.

That year, Pam Smith of Chicago, searching for an enslaved ancestor from the same county in Missouri, was referred to me. We became immediate family history buddies on the phone. A few years later, on a research trip to Randolph County, Pam discovered that her known slave ancestor was OWNED by one of mine! Recovering from that jarring reality, in 1996 we developed an ever- evolving slide presentation we call “Entangled Lives” --about our respective family histories, our friendship, and our struggles to come to terms with the ugly past we share. We’ve presented EL innumerable times in many states and have spent several years working intensively on co-writing a book, (that unfortunately, we were unable to complete). At the national gathering of Coming to the Table last year we found that we were not alone in our mission to face the legacies of that painful history; joining a “Linked Descendants” group made perfect sense.

Slaveholding was ubiquitous and tragically “ordinary” in the heritage of so many of us whites in this country over the generations. I believe there are millions of living descendants of enslavers in the U.S. today who need to begin the work of hard honesty (Dave’s blog title!) -- if possible, with descendants of the people their ancestors enslaved. This first step of acknowledgement is just one part of the necessary cooperative social action necessary to get to a place of racial healing, which this blog promises to further. Those of us whose ancestors benefited from slavery -- whether they held one, two, several, or hundreds of slaves -- must begin by addressing the extent of the damage[h1] done.

Although I retired from Puget Sound in 2001, besides keeping up on my reading and research, doing genealogy, painting, gardening (sort of), and conferring with Pam Smith on the phone, I still teach one class in Race Relations to the wonderful students at Santa Rosa Jr. College.