Pat Bearden shows a picture of her great-great-grandmother Fredonia Parrish. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune)
Pat Bearden has long been on a mission to learn about her ancestors, but an account of her enslaved great, great-grandmother being emancipated left her enthralled.
"It raised the hairs on the back of my neck and everywhere else," said Bearden, a co-founder of the Chicago-based International Society of Sons and Daughters of Slave Ancestry.
With this the sesquicentennial of President Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Bearden and others hope such stories will encourage more African-Americans to delve into their personal histories, unafraid of what they'll find.
What Bearden learned through a journal and an oral history was that her great, great-grandmother and others were owned by a Mississippi slave-trader and his wife. Some time after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, they summoned their "servants," as they referred to them, and told them they were no longer slaves.
"And I don't want to hear that any of you are calling yourselves Fitzgerald," said William H. Fitzgerald. "You're free men."
However self-serving the man's comment, Bearden said, the former slaves cast off the custom of taking their owners' name and adopted the surname "Freeman." Her relative, known then as "Donia," had become "Fredonia" by the time her death was recorded in 1913.
"I think with every fiber of my being that she changed her name. Fredonia means freedom," Bearden said.
The anniversary also can serve as a kind of yardstick of how far the country has come — or not — since Lincoln turned the moral compass of the Civil War by making it as much about slaves' freedom as saving the country, according to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The Washington, D.C.-based group is emphasizing the importance of the Emancipation Proclamation during February, which is Black History Month.
Tony Burroughs of Chicago was a student at Southern Illinois University when he heard author Alex Haley say he was going to follow his book on Malcolm X with one on slavery. "Roots" came out about seven years later, at a time when few people talked about genealogy, Burroughs said.
The topic fascinated him and he ended up teaching it at Chicago State University for more than 30 years. In tracing his own family back seven or eight generations, he discovered that relative David Truman was fortunate to have migrated with other slaves from Maryland to Pennsylvania where Quakers worked to abolish slavery long before the issue broke apart the nation.
Truman's owner specified in her will that he was to be freed at age 25 and taught to read and write. He was set free in 1806, Burroughs said.
"Because of racism, prejudice, discrimination, black people have been left out of history, their stories and accomplishments not told," Burroughs said. "African-Americans have a hot, fervent need to find out who their ancestors were. It's part of humanity to find out."
Burroughs grew up with his grandfather, but had to do research to discover that he'd been president of the Cook County Bar Association — despite dropping out of high school, Burroughs said.
"It had a tremendous impact on me," he said. "Many in the African-American community lack self-esteem. They don't know their history. If they found out, they would look differently at themselves, at their country."
Doris Morton of Bolingbrook, a retired elementary teacher, started researching her mother's side of the family and found Paschal Hickman, her great-great-great-grandfather. An article said Hickman, who was white, owned slaves, including his "wife" Fanny and their seven children.
"It was not legal to marry a black woman. It was just a master-slave relationship," Morton said. But Hickman emancipated Fanny and the children, who moved without him to Illinois, probably because it was a free state, Morton said.
She's tracked all of Fanny's children and knows that some of her relatives are buried in an overgrown black cemetery near Clinton, Ill. But it's not enough.
"I want to know if Fanny was just a slave or was there an emotional connection (to Hickman). I want to think there was an emotional part of him that didn't want to leave them in bondage to be sold upon his death," Morton said. "Or was she a strong woman who was able to convince him to free her children?"
She'll keep digging, trying to find a journal or even information on a white family that mentions Fanny.
"We need to know our history and tell our children where we came from and how our ancestors lived," Morton said. "It gives you a sense of self, a sense of community. When you know what life was like, you know the things you can accomplish because you know what the people before you accomplished."