This article showed up on the news feed on the BBC this morning.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/trac ... s/p09nyk44
The woman being interviewed states that "What really shook me to the core was discovering that" her grandmother 5 generations removed was the first to be enslaved. Seven generations back. She goes on to say "and that she had a daughter, who also had a daughter" and that "they were all kept together by her enslaver".
I do not for a minute excuse slavery, or her enslaver. But often times slave owners are shown to be especially unkind and inconsiderate by breaking up families, mothers from their children, husbands from wives, etc. She says nothing about any male ancestors, perhaps because slaves were "breed like animals", and maybe there was no real affection between the "partners". But leaving this family intact - three generations - could be considered a small touch of kindness. (Again, no excuses for the slave owner, just a response in view of other accounts where this was not done.)
But back to the 7 generations. That's a great deal of time. She knows, in fact, a great deal more of her family's background than I do of my own. Oh, I have some names, and a few "family legends" about certain of my ancestors, but the one I'm thinking of especially only goes back 5 generations, to my Great Great Great Grandfather, who is said to have been found under a tree, as an abandoned infant. Although he was "adopted" by a Mennonite family, and raised as one of their own (as far as the story goes) he was, the story goes, given the name of the species of tree under which he was found as his surname. (Incidentally, as a side story, it is through his daughter that I am half 3rd cousin to "John Denver", me through her first marriage, and he through her second, thus the "half".) But there is no "documentation" that proves this story of his origin. So it is interesting to me that this woman basically can only know the facts of her ancestry specifically because her ancestor was enslaved.
Please forgive me for another reference to the Banawa. I just can't help myself.... When we first arrived in the Banawa village, they did not know that they were known by that name. They just referred to themselves as a phrase that means "Us", or, to be more specific, by a phrase meaning "The People who Inhabit the Banks of Stone Creek" (Yati Fa-ka Me). But this location was at the mouth of this creek, Yati Fa, where it entered a somewhat larger creek, called Kitia ("Fast Running"). And so as the village grew, and some built houses a bit farther away from the Yati Fa, they were technically Kitia-ka Me, two different names for parts of the same village. Long side story to say that I set out to find a common ancestor, to refer to them by that name, instead of using one that they didn't even know about. I was very surprised to find that in spite of being a tribe of only 59 people, they did not have a common ancestor, as far as anyone could recount. But there was one older man who knew a lot of genealogy, and I wrote down everything he could tell me. I consulted with him multiple times, and he would sometimes seem to contradict himself, even in the same sitting. This is somewhat excusable, as 1.) this was not his own family background he was recounting, bu that of every person he could recall by name in the tribe's history, and 2.) by the fact that the kinship system in the Banawa regards one's father's brother as also a "father", and likewise a mother's sister as also a "mother". Thus also these parallel cousins are regarded as siblings. But my main point is that this is an oral culture. Nothing is preserved in any form other than the memory of the living members of the society. I doubt if there is any living member of the Banawa who knows all this information that I have written down in my notes. So, if anyone is still reading this (I know I went around the barn a few times to get to this point), why would she, or any of us, be "shaken to the core" by facts about things that happened to ancestors, when if these things had not happened to these ancestors, nothing at all would be known of them, absolutely nothing at all of what they lives were like. In my own history as a Dutch Mennonite, I can guess at things that my ancestors might have experienced, because there are stories in Martyrs' Mirror, but none of those people were my ancestors, as far as any living person can tell. Sure, someone will say that what happened to MY ancestors does not affect my life today. But it DOES. If not for the persecution of my people, "I" might be living in Holland. (It's all nonsense, because "I" would not exist, because this continued persecution is what brought my ancestors together, and ultimately what brought my parents together.) Maybe "MY" family back then were a wealthy merchants, and "I" have been "deprived" of all of this because of the actions of the Spanish Catholics who controlled the Dutch lands at that time. Maybe my life now would be different if the Black Pastor had not cheated my father out of the agreed price on a used car my dad rebuilt for resale. (My Dad forgave the debt, and made no effort to pressure him to "pay up". THIS is what I "inherited" from that experience - I learned what kind of man my father was, and was shown by this loss how a Christian person responds. That is the heritage I gained from his having been cheated. And we can gain the same kind of lessons from obscure stories about our ancestors.)
