My Relentless Search to Find My Family’s African American ‘Eve’
Unearthing her origins required keen detective work and diligence
SAY MY NAME! To honor the memory, sacrifice, and very being of our ancestors, we say their name. If we don’t know their name, they may call to us to seek it out.
Popcorn ready, I was on the couch, feet up and glued to the TV. Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s senior adviser, was being featured on Finding Your Roots, the PBS TV show that helps celebrities explore their family history. I was watching this particular episode because our own family drums had beaten, via the frequently used family group text, to give everyone the heads-up to tune in because Valerie’s great-great-grandfather Henry Taylor is also ours. So we were anticipating hearing details about our own family history. Midway through the show, the host, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, “revealed” Henry Taylor’s name to Valerie, along with the fact that Angus Taylor, a White North Carolina landholder and enslaver, was both Henry Taylor’s owner and father.
This was not a revelation for us, however. My grandmother and her sisters had passed knowledge of their grandfather Henry Taylor down to my generation. We even had a family reunion called “The Descendants of Henry Taylor” in 1999 and again in 2017. But what Skip Gates…
