When the Record and the Road Point in the Same Direction

What the 10 Million Names Project and a growing wave of ancestry travel have in common with the family-history travel list I built.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about 10 Million Names, an effort to recover the identities of enslaved people the historical record was never built to keep. Then World Tourism Day put me in an unexpected position. For the first time in my life, I sat down and wrote out an actual travel list, one that had nothing to do with a bucket list and everything to do with where my family comes from. It took a few days to see that both projects come from the same instinct, pointed in two different directions: one works through archives, the other through the places themselves.

The 10 Million Names Project works by drawing on census schedules, church registers, estate documents, and court files that were never connected before, sometimes not even aware of one another's existence. It's slow, patient work against a very specific kind of silence, the silence of a record that was never kept because someone in power decided a name wasn't worth the ink.

Ancestry travel does something different with the same refusal. Instead of going back into the paper, it goes to the ground the paper came from. It means confirming a name and then taking an actual road or flight, and standing where a document says something happened instead of just reading that it happened.

My own list keeps growing as I find more places my family has lived, and I have also unearthed new family members. I have always known that we had roots throughout New York: Albany, Kingston, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. We also have roots in New Jersey: Belleville, East Orange, Orange, Plainfield, and Westfield. There was also family in Washington, DC; Youngstown, OH; Nashville, TN; Lucedale, MS; New Orleans, LA; Montgomery, AL; Philadelphia, Chambersburg, and Lincoln University, PA. And we have since ventured to Seattle, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, California, and Texas (I was born in San Antonio). Archival research has also revealed our connections to many cities in North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia, including Farmville, Halifax, and Danville.

Farmville isn't new to that list; I've known my family's history there for years. What's new is a deed I found among my PopPop's files, a copy of the land given to his ancestors there after they were freed following the Civil War. Until that deed turned up, Farmville was a town in Prince Edward County attached to a plantation and a boundary where the paper trail stopped, nothing I could actually stand in front of. Now I have an actual patch of ground.

That wall has another side to it, one I only worked out recently. My great-great-great grandmother, Julia Venable, appears under that name on record after record, in the deed, in probate filings, on documents written to account for property rather than people. She was the daughter of Judy, an enslaved woman, and the man who enslaved them both, William Henry Venable, a member of the family that owned Slate Hill. My history on that land runs in two directions at once: enslaved there, and related through blood to the family that enslaved them. I'm still working out what to do with that, but it belongs in this story, not around it.

I've sat with that wall for a long time. It isn't a research obstacle you route around with a different search strategy or a different archive. It's the edge of the record itself, the point past which nothing was written down. For years it was an abstraction to me, a gap I mentioned in research updates and shrugged off because there was nothing else to do with it.

The list doesn't stop at the water, either. It crosses to a place called Kinderton in England, and to Cologne, Germany, the well-documented side of the family, the one that never hit a wall like Farmville's. It also reaches toward Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and Senegal. The list also points toward France and Ireland, according to my AncestryDNA results, the parts of the map where the paper thins out again and where DNA is doing work that documents alone can't yet finish.

That's the whole shape of what I've come to understand this month. A recovered name in an archive, a deed that's been sitting in a file since before I was born, a DNA result pointing toward a continent—these are all refusals to accept that the record's incompleteness, or the distance, is the final word. One works on documents. One works on places. I've spent decades doing the archival work. I'm only now starting to take the road just as seriously, one deed, one name, one confirmed place at a time.

If you're sitting on a name you've recovered but never visited, or a place you've always meant to go but haven't, there's no wrong order here. Some people need to see the place before the name means anything. I needed the name first. I suspect a lot of people do.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

A name in an archive and a place on a map are the same argument, made two different ways: a person, and where they stood, is worth remembering on purpose.

If you had to pick one place on your own list to go first, where would it be, and what's stopping you?

WORTH NOTING

If this is the first time you're hearing of the 10 Million Names Project, it's searchable now at 10millionnames.org. It’s worth a few minutes if you're wondering whether a name in your own family might already be there.

If your wall looks anything like mine with Farmville, there’s one more resource: Hampden-Sydney College. They have a genealogy research program for descendants of the people enslaved at Slate Hill, the surrounding plantations, and the college itself. Worth a look if Farmville, or a place like it, shows up on your own map.