-Photo Courtesy of Alison Percich
By Emily Blackner
Copy Editor
One woman’s quest for answers about her past has led her from rural Mississippi to the heart of Maryland, and Chestertown in particular.
Dionne Ford, a journalist and fiction writer originally from Mississippi, gave her talk, entitled “From Slaves to Senators: A Kent County Family in Black and White,” at 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 15. In it, she documented her experiences trying to find out about her ancestors, which brought her to Washington College specifically. Her great-great-great grandfather attended college here at WC, and Ford said that the College’s archives allowed her to find and read papers he had written during his tenure here.
But the main focus of her talk was William R. Stuart, her great-great grandfather. Ford began the presentation by reading an obituary that was written about him, demonstrating how well-respected he was in the Kent County community. Stuart served as a legislator from Kent and Queen Anne’s County and was president of the Maryland Senate. He was also a colonel in the Confederate army during the Civil War.
Stuart’s wife Elizabeth, from whom he inherited much of his land, was sickly for all of her life and unable to bear children, which meant that the matriarch of the family was Tempy Burton, a slave given to Elizabeth as a wedding present. Tempy was the main relative Ford was interested in, but records were sparse. “I had to find out about the Colonel to find Tempy,” she said.
Ford was also interested in Tempy’s youngest child, Josephine Burton, Ford’s great-grandmother. Ford runs a blog called Finding Josephine detailing her search for the missing ancestors. She uncovered that Josephine was born in approximately 1875, years after slavery ended, and that a rift with the Stuart side of the family caused to go by her mother’s last name. That, plus Tempy’s continued presence on the Stuarts’ lands, pointed to another dimension to a complicated relationship.
“I don’t know what I make of that yet,” Ford said. “Most people never get proof of anything like this occurring.” But Ford found birth certificates that list Tempy and Stuart as the children’s parents.
Her own family history also illustrated the complex views about slavery held in antebellum America. A letter she found had the Colonel advising his son to “never entangle” himself with slaves, yet both he and the son sold slaves.
Also unusual is that Tempy owned her own land after she was freed, and that her funeral was documented and well-attended. “This might be because they knew about her relationship with the Colonel,” Ford said.
She and her ancestor had a lot in common; Ford found an advertisement Tempy had submitted to a newspaper asking for news of her relatives who had been sold to another plantation. “She was looking for her people, too,” Ford said.
All of this searching started with a question posed to her grandfather at the age of 12: “Are you white?” The answer- no, but his grandfather had been a white man- led to even more questions, and eventually a lengthy search and a family reunion.
Through the website ancestry.com, Ford found that she had a cousin named Monique who happened to live close to her own house, and they found a shared connection. Monique was descended from the “singing cousins” who left the familial home in Ocean Springs, Miss., to study music at the Boston Conservatory. The PowerPoint presentation that accompanied the talk featured many picture of Ford’s rediscovered relatives. Ford’s immediately family, a husband and two daughters, were in the audience for the talk as well.
Ford and her cousin were also able to find some artifacts related to their family. This included a painted portrait at the Maryland Historical Society of Stuart and of his father with the same name, leading Ford to refer to him as “big Will,” and a rare photograph featuring several relatives. Monique also found a sword on eBay that belonged to “the Colonel” when he was a member of the Knights of Pythias organization.
Other documentation of the family history was more unorthodox. Ford discovered that Stuart had a stained glass window in a church dedicated to him. “The family has a long history of Methodism,” Ford said, and was pleased that her own Methodism gave her something else in common with her ancestors. Josephine Burton even married a Methodist minister.
Ford also got to sample Stuart Pecans, which were debuted by her ancestors at the 1893 World’s Fair.
After a few questions from the audience, Ford went to the Heron Point Retirement Community to hear a talk given by three residents there who were instrumental in desegregating Chestertown in the 1960s. That presentation began at 8 p.m.
Ford plans to continue delving into her ancestors’ past. Particularly, she wants to find the location of the family estate at Denbeigh, where the Colonel was born. Competing claims have placed it in Kent or Queen Anne County. She is also working on a novel about a black expatriate in Brazil.