In many ways, the overgrown cemetery on a South Carolina rice plantation where my paternal ancestors are buried is emblematic of Black history itself. On my first visit in 2013, I went in search of the Fields family graves. There I found many unmarked graves, some of them nothing more than sunken depressions, as far as the eye could see. A few had simple headstones. One marked grave had been broken wide open by a fallen tree limb, and had filled with water. I was horrified to see my ancestor’s skeletal remains floating at the top.
After researching the history of peasant rice farmers in West Africa for over a decade, I had recently extended my research to enslaved laborers on Lowcountry South Carolina rice plantations. But I had not thought to research my own family’s history. Seeing that open grave made me feel as though I had turned my back on my ancestors. I pledged then to find out who was buried in that cemetery and tell their story.
African Americans searching for their family histories often have only small irregular pieces of an enormous puzzle. Most of those pieces are missing because enslaved African Americans were not recorded by their first and last names. Until recently, identifying enslaved and formerly enslaved people who lived before that time was virtually impossible. To complicate matters, professional historians typically analyze and interpret plantation owners’ records, which identify enslaved people as property and by first name only, and describe the violence that was done to them, how their labor was exploited and their bodies abused. These records deny our ancestors’ humanity.
Because of these limitations, it had become accepted as fact among historians and genealogists that efforts to recover African American family histories reaching back to the time of slavery would hit a brick wall.
Today, I’m excited to report, the brick wall, or at least a large part of it, has been dismantled. Projects to digitize enormous troves of once difficult to access records are giving African American families opportunities to recover more of our lost past and offering historians the potential to enrich and rewrite the history of slavery.
When I embarked on my journey to research my father’s family’s history, all I had to go on was a list of names from the census that included that of Hector Fields, my great-great-great grandfather, and his direct descendants. It wasn’t much, but it was something; most African Americans can trace their families back only a few generations. I knew I would need new tools to uncover the history of my enslaved ancestors.
Fortunately my mission aligned with the International African American Museum’s Center for Family History in Charleston, S.C., one of the first genealogical centers focusing on African Americans. The center is open to both scholars and individuals who want to use the museum’s resources to research their family history and the role African Americans have played in building and shaping the nation. Perhaps the most valuable resource of all is the United States Colored Troops Pension File Project, which is collecting the pension files of the African American men who served in Civil War regiments and making digitized records available to all, not just to scholars like me. Because these files have been so underused as a historical source, the potential for discovery here is exciting.
Decades after the war, Black veterans, along with their widows, dependents and neighbors, told their stories of enslavement and freedom when they applied for pensions for their military service. Approximately 140,000 formerly enslaved men fought in the Civil War. Approximately 83,000 Black Civil War veterans received pensions.
To help in my search, the Center for Family History’s researchers identified a Hector Fields who had enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers. He had a military service record, but no pension file. They later found the file of a Jonas Fields who served with Black troops in the 128th Regiment.
In Jonas’s pension file, a woman by the name of Phoebe Washington testified that she had two brothers, Hector and Jonas Fields, who went after the war to work on rice plantations in the same area where the Fields family I knew lived. She gave the names of their parents, Anson and Judy, and the name of the family who held them in bondage in downtown Beaufort. With one pension file, I was able to fill in multiple gaps in my family tree: I found my great-great-great-great grandparents, Hector Fields’s siblings, and the location where most of my paternal grandfather’s family had been enslaved.
Jonas Fields’s pension file also confirmed that I am a direct descendant of the same Hector Fields who fought in the famous Combahee River Raid in 1863, when Harriet Tubman, who was working as a spy for the United States Army, provided key intelligence in the daring expedition to rescue some 700 people from bondage on seven South Carolina rice plantations.
My cousins and I were so proud. We were also profoundly sorry that our Fields family patriarch who had pointed me to the plantation cemetery did not live long enough to learn of this important history.
Eventually I collaborated with the International African American Museum to widen my research beyond my own family and help identify hundreds of the 756 enslaved people who liberated themselves in the Combahee raid, then trace their lives backward into enslavement and forward into freedom.
It may sound difficult, but it is easier than you think for African Americans who are not professional researchers or scholars to break down the brick walls in their own family histories: Use genealogical search engines like Ancestry.com or Family Search to identify ancestors who have Civil War pension files, then order copies from the National Archives or view them on the museum’s Center for Family History website (for South Carolina regiments). If you are fortunate enough to obtain a file in which other soldiers testify, you can deepen your research by requesting these soldiers’ pension files, too. The testimony of your ancestor’s widow, comrades and neighbors in another soldier’s pension file may hold additional keys to your family history.
African American veterans approved for Civil War pensions could have thousands of descendants, so millions of African Americans could recover their family’s history using these recently digitized records. I hope that the files will inspire and energize historians to create tools and methods of recovering our ancestors’ names, voices and stories. This knowledge could have profound effects on what Americans know about slavery and how we grapple with its legacy.
My cousins and I have come together to fix the grave in the cemetery that had been damaged and to identify and mark one of the Fields family’s unmarked graves. There are still pieces missing from my family’s puzzle, but finding Hector Fields was the beginning.
