Thrilled to announce that my presentation proposal, “Not Yet Completely Free: Gradual Emancipation and the Family of Moses Williams, Philadelphia, 1776-1833.” was accepted for the 45th AAHGS National Conference this October! Appreciate the opportunity to share, learn and contact other genealogists and family historians at this wonderful event, hosted by AAHGS President LaJoy Mosby.
The conference theme is “Fighting Erasure: Staying Visible by Keeping African American Genealogy and History in Focus.” This centers on the “role of preserving and spotlighting African American history and genealogy in the broader narrative of American history.”
Silhouette of “Moses Williams, Cutter of Profiles, 1802″Library Company of Philadelphia.
Here’s my abstract for my presentation, “Not Yet Completely Free: Gradual Emancipation and the Family of Moses Williams, Philadelphia, 1776-1833.” :
When the word slavery comes to mind, many think of the US South, rather than the Northern states. Northern slavery’s history is less well known, particularly in states with gradual emancipation—Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut. This presentation focuses on the family histories tied to the silhouette artist and museum artisan Moses Williams (1776-ca 1833), to glimpse African descended, Free People of Color and the challenges faced in their process of emancipation. The reality of bondage challenges the image of Philadelphia, a city so closely identified with national freedom. Important clues for Moses Williams and his family are contained in archives that includes the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and records for his former enslaver, the Maryland-born portrait painter and Philadelphia-museum owner Charles Willson Peale (1746-1823). Peale held Williams’ parents between 1776-1786, and freed Williams in 1803. Most archival material on the Williams family is excavated from the Papers of the Peale Family, newspapers, deeds & census records. While the origins of Williams parents remain a question, records suggest the situations that Free Black Philadelphians contended with under the 1780 act for Gradual Abolition. Freedom was negotiated and paid for with terms of service at a tender age. This case study shows how the increased availability of digitized records and community research helps restore the experiences of free Black families to a larger historical narrative.
My deep thanks to Nancy Proctor and Dean Krimmel of The Peale Baltimore, who have invited me to share my work on Moses Williams, who now has a museum space and internship program named after him; and to Carol Soltis, of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who is currently studying Williams’ technique and style for the profiles he produced, that numbered nearly nine thousand. Williams’ family members experienced degrees of unfreedom in different ways, and I seek to acknowledge their resilience by considering the ways they sought freedom at the cusp of the nineteenth century.
I’m so excited to say i’m one of the genealogists who’ll be participating in this event. I’ll be zooming in & chatting with Kenyatta Berry, former host of Genealogy Roadshow, LaJoy Mosby, President of AAHGS and guests about how to get started with genealogy– even if you haven’t started before. Let’s get into it!
About the event: Ties of the Black and Brown communities in DC go deep! Chuck Brown is the father of go-go, but did you know about the music’s Latin influence? We’re excited to announce a first-ever event in a celebration of similar and shared heritage, history, and identity. Plus—discover how to unlock the secrets of your own ancestry with renowned genealogists LaJoy Mosby, President of AAHGS, Dr. Ellen Fernandez-Sacco, with special guest Ms. Kenyatta Berry, former co-host of the “Genealogy Roadshow” will also be here!
Verbal Gymnastics is bringing Playback Theatre (where storytelling and art meet community) to the party, so get ready for some amazing and interactive improv! We’ll also have the DC Office of the Medical Examiner onsite to highlight Black and Brown missing persons cases. Learn how genealogy is used to solve crime! So come on out—there’s something for everyone!
Date: Saturday, June 15
Time: 1pm – 5pm
Location: Episcopal Church of the Atonement (5073 East Capitol St SE) and 52nd St SE
Admission: Free and Open to All
Highlights Include:
Live Music: Go-Go, The Lilo Gonzalez Band, and More!
DJ Buddah!
Free Food!
Cultural Performances!
Game Truck!
Giveaways!
Parking:
Street parking and parking lot at Guiding Light Baptist Church (1 51st St SE)
About The Majani Project:
Organized by the Majani Project, a Black youth-focused genealogy nonprofit located in Ward 7, in collaboration with Genealogy Adventures, the premiere Black online genealogy show, this event aims to introduce youth and adults to genealogy to honor the ancestors, unravel family history mysteries, and connect with your roots.
Come to a series of short presentations and a panel discussion on Black History & Genealogy in Puerto Rico! I’m excited to share in the discussion at this event this afternoon, hosted by Taller Entre Aguas & Black Testimony Project.
Join TEA x BTP on April 25, 2024 from 2pm-4pm EST for a special virtual event titled, Mareas de Memoria: Black Puerto Rican History and Genealogy on Zoom.
For over twenty years in Moca, the Museo is an important focal point, interconnecting tejedoras, artisans, materials and cultural memory, under the directorship of Don Mokay Hernandez Vale.
Don Benito ‘Mokay’ Hernandez Vale founded the museum with the support of a group of tejedoras (master lacemakers), some no longer with us. Today, El Museo del Mundillo sits near the town’s plaza in the former 1935 health building on Calle Barbosa in the heart of Barrio Pueblo in Moca.
The museum serves the community by connecting artisans, hosting trainings, coordinating festivals and events. Featured are many examples of local lacemaking, and the institution preserves aspects of mundillo’s history all too often lost when an artisan passes.
Also on display are works that tie mundillo to deeper histories of the island. This is seen in the framed work of Carmen Quinones Marcial & Frances Mendez Colon’s (QEPD) Tejidos de Maguey. Featured is lace made from the fibers of the maguey plant, processed and transformed into a decorative arrangement of fan and flowers.
This talk covered an overview of the museum, the community’s century’s long involvement with mundillo and the importance of supporting this institution today.
Here’s a recent tour of the Museo del Mundillo by the Museo de las Americas PR’s #DaleClickaLaCultura initiative:
I’m delighted to learn of one artist’s amazing use of mundillo in their work- artist Glorimar Garcia reached out after my talk and shared her site! – Be sure to check out her installations & projects.
The talk is archived for IOLI members. IOLI VP Prabha Ramakrishand sent a lovely letter of acknowledgement and a year subscription to the IOLI digital journal. So appreciate the gift!
The idea of a cemetery often brings with it a belief in permanence. The emotional, physical and community efforts to commemorate ancestors can collide with the sobering reality of what happens when these sites of memory are lost, forgotten or erased by larger forces set in play by Jim Crow. These erasures wipe away the human traces of a former world built with a difficult history that extends to the Post-Emancipation period.
Myrtle Hill Cemetery & Spanish Park East Cemetery in maps. What lies beneath, USF, Dec 2023
Overbuilt & Conveniently Forgotten
During the time I have lived here, several rediscovered burial grounds beneath high schools and housing complexes appeared in the pages of the Tampa Bay Times, awakening the grief of many over the unmarked graves. In 2019 the bodies of ancestors buried in the Zion Cemetery and Ridgewood Cemetery emerged as recent examples of a history of segregation literally buried in the rush to develop areas of Tampa. Ground penetrating radar found 145 of the original 270 burials from the former Ridgewood cemetery that year, nearly all of them Black.[1] Redlining was the motor for such outcomes.
Museum Studies: Race, Memorialization & the Museum
Over forty cemeteries and burial grounds were identified in the study undertaken by Dr. Kimmerle and her Ph.D. candidate Kelsee Hentschel-Fey, along with GIS Manager Benjamin Mittler, and Dr. Lori Collins of the USF Center for Digital Heritage and Geospatial Information. Students in Dr. Kimmerle’s museum studies class “Race, Memorialization and the Museum” produced the exhibition.
“The exhibit offers a unique view into the history of the area told through the lens of its cemeteries, utilizing historic and modern photographs, archival documents and maps depicting the approximate locations of newly re-discovered burial grounds, and mixed media sculptures to help convey the story of the buried past. “
Memory Jug, Caitlin Figueroa. Mixed media.
Images of the Exhibit: December 2023
This fascinating show was created by several scholars who came together in a multi-year interdisciplinary investigation into unmarked burial grounds in Hillsborough County, Florida. As one walks through the exhibit, the layers of information ultimately defy anonymity, and offers proof of a history told by those who lie beneath the city. To end on the Dozier School for Boys was a powerful note. Here are some of my fotos of the show, that lend an idea of the content.
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Why this Show Matters
Given the history of this state and the current efforts to obscure Black and Indigenous histories, this exhibit matters.
There remains a profound need for a followup exhibition covering the continued efforts on memorialization by various local and descendant communities as additional sites come to light.
[1] Paul Guzzo, “NAACP wants reparations for Tampa’s Black cemeteries that government “stole”. Tampa Bay times 27 Feb 2023
See collection of articles on the Tampa Bay Times website:
In search of lost cemeteriesA number of cemeteries forgotten through the years across the Tampa Bay area came to light during 2019, most of them final resting places for African-Americans. The new attention to old burial grounds springs from a Tampa Bay Times report in June that revealed the first and largest of them – Zion Cemetery in Tampa.
Mira lo que los Tres Reyes Magos brought to my house!
A new book by Lic Lorenzo Oscar Caban Arocho, Bienvenidos a Moca. As you can see, this is a big book that is another contribution to a growing list of books on the experience of being Mocano. In it, Caban Arocho brings together his memories with a wide range of photos and publications on Moca.
This book, as with other generational local histories, take a highly personal perspective and are insightful as they lend a sense of the changes in barrio Pueblo over time. There’s even his reflections on my article on Leoncia Lasalle and her family, that awakened his recollection that she was his partera, the midwife who brought him into the world over eight decades before.
I’m looking forward to delving into the book— and will post where you can buy a copy. In the meantime, here’s the ISBN number: ISBN 979-8-3507-2470-7
Lcdo. Lorenzo Oscar Caban Arocho, from Bookdatabase online. Note the sleeve decoration made of mundillo. His wife is an accomplished tejedora (lacemaker).
Cover, Lorenzo Oscar Caban Arocho, Bienvenidos a Moca (2023)
Daryl Lewis demonstrates a silhouette panel at the new Moses Williams Gallery at The Peale, Baltimore, 2023
Williams, born about 1776, was a skilled silhouette artist, born into slavery; he and his parents were enslaved by Charles Willson Peale. His parents gained their freedom and Williams grew up working in the Peale family’s Philadelphia Museum, where he learned to prepare and install exhibits. In the summer of 1799, Williams learned taxidermy as an assistant to Peale, preparing birds collected on the New Jersey Shore. In 1801, he worked mounting the skeleton of the mastodon, and in 1803 became a silhouette cutter at the museum, on the second floor of Independence Hall. Williams was literate, probably picked up a bit of Latin, placed his own advertisements in the local newspaper, bought land, owned a home, and was known in the local community.
Williams, the first Black museum professional in the U.S., now has a center and a gallery named in his honor. Moments in his life are illustrated by silhouettes that visitors can see with a penlight as they go through the gallery as seen above.
“Moses Williams, cutter of profiles”, silhouette, 1802
Today, the Moses Williams Center is the Peale Museum’s teaching gallery and home to the Accomplished Arts Apprenticeship program, which offers training in exhibition preparation and the historic preservation trades. Their recruiting fairs for the program happen the third week of October for this 32 week program. Launched in 2020, this paid apprenticeship consists of “non-traditional mentorship and vocational training in fine art, curatorial practice, art installation, logistics, and historic building preservation to develop transferable skills using arts as the driving force.”
This is a wonderful way to memorialize Moses Williams’ skills, creativity and resilience. It is in stark contrast to the withering account of him and his family given by Rembrandt Peale in “The Physiognotrace.” published in an 1857 issue of The Crayon. My guess is that this was such an awful perspective that Lillian Miller found she could not bear to discuss it in her bibliography for her catalog, In Search of Fame: Rembrandt Peale 1778-1860. While Peale’s account held no expectations for Williams’ person or future, it is, ironically, the main building block for understanding the context that Williams lived and worked in.
Enslavement, the slave trade and Native dispossession are no longer marginal to the story of Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia. Moses Williams is now a very visible ancestor.
See my “Racial Theory, Museum Practice: The Coloured World of Charles Willson Peale.” Museum Anthropology, 1996. You can download a copy here.
This has turned out to be a busy month! I finished my last article for the series on “Reconstructing Missing Volume of the Registro Central de Esclavos, pt 4” for the forthcoming volume 24 of Hereditas: Revista de la Sociedad Puertorriquena de Genealogia. I hope to submit “Looking for Lorenzo Ubiles, Alcalde de barrio Humacao 1873.” for the AAHGS Journal shortly.
I’m happy to announce that on Thursday October 19, 1:30 PM-2:30 EST, I’ll be presenting “El Registro de Esclavos: An archive you need to know”, at “Hidden in Plain Sight: Recovering the erased stories of our ancestors in the United States and the Caribbean”, the 44th Annual 2023 AAHGS Virtual Conference. Excited to be among so many great presentations & presenters that includes friends & family from Black ProGen Live! Sessions will be available until Dec 31.
Here’s the description: The process of emancipation in Puerto Rico formally began in 1868, with the registration of over 30,000 enslaved persons using cedulas, small registration forms 6 x 8” in size. The information on these forms were copied to create the volumes of the Registro de Esclavos, issued in 1872. FamilySearch microfilmed two series of these documents from the enormous collection of Gobiernos Españoles collection. These are now searchable on the FamilySearch site as “Puerto Rico Slave Registers, 1863-1879”. These entries shed light on the identities of people as they transitioned to freedom just fifteen years before the establishment of the Registro Civil (Civil Registration) in 1885 and the formal end of slavery in 1886. The information covers name, origin, parents, partner, children, enslaver, physical details and issues around the purchase of freedom, manumission, or even the death of the person listed. The ages range from days old to persons in their 80s. These documents are useful for identifying family members and confirming their identities and locations pre-1885, and who may not appear in the 1910 census. Recently digitized archives on the Archivo Digital Nacional de Puerto Rico (ADNPR.net) that overlap with the information in the Registro de Esclavos will be covered. This work is a contribution to the ancestors, to help bridge them with their descendants.
Yesterday evening, the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project (MPCPMP) hosted Antonio Rocha’s performance of “Voyage through Death to Life upon these Shores”: The Malaga Speaks. Here’s the description of the program, which will soon be on YouTube:
The story of the Malaga, a 19th century ship built in Maine that transported captive Africans, was created and will be performed by Antonio Rocha. Told from the perspective of the ship, Rocha uses song, narration, and mime to weave his way through this historical tale that chronicles the history of the trans-Atlantic human trade and its legacy. Annually, on August 23rd, the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project (MPCPMP) hosts a program to acknowledge this day and the lives of those captive Africans who perished during the trans-Atlantic crossing known as the Middle Passage and the ten million who survived to build the Americas. Through the presentation of this creative work, The Malaga Speaks, MPCPMP offers a broader narrative of connection and the Diaspora – from ship building, to the ocean voyage, to arrival, into enslavement; from Maine, to Africa, across the Atlantic, to Brazil.
Rocha’s performance is a powerful one. He builds and weaves a narrative that reveal layers of history and experiences of the Middle Passage as a knowledge that is both painful and liberatory the deeper he enters into the story of the Malaga. There is a body memory, a visceral space where those who survive decide what they can carry, and what was left by the ancestors for us today.
