Connecting Family through Genealogy with Hollis Gentry

Hollis Gentry is a genealogy specialist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture Library. Following DeNeen Brown’s overview of family separation and slavery in our previous episode, Hollis shares her personal quest to reconnect her family through genealogical research.

Could you tell us about your family and your childhood growing up?

I come from a family of five, two boys and a girl, and I am the middle child. My family was very close-knit. We were of Southern origins: my father was born in Kentucky, my mother was born in Virginia. That influenced part of our lifestyle, although we lived everywhere, almost.

I grew up in the suburbs of Maryland. My parents were civil servants: my father was a science teacher in middle school in Washington, DC. My mother was a counselor of young children and teenagers who were being monitored by the juvenile justice system. At home, our discussions were typically focused around teaching and learning. My parents were very attentive to our learning processes and exposed us to a lot of cultures.

As we were growing up, my parents took us to different places. They would focus on us going to different ethnic communities and neighborhoods. So although our family was African American, they exposed us to people from all over the globe. I was very fortunate in that regard. As I got older, I grew up with this consciousness of people coming from all sorts of places. My mother was a fantastic storyteller. She’s a counselor, so she’s accustomed to interviewing people. She just had this knack for interacting with people even though she was somewhat of an introvert.

I used to observe this growing up: My mother could walk into a room of complete strangers and connect with someone, and not just simply connect with them, but pull a story out of them, a narrative. Because my mother was a storyteller, she also had a tremendous interest in our own family’s history. I heard from her the earliest of stories about my ancestors. By virtue of the fact that her great-grandmother lived from 1858 to about 1956, she was able to extract a lot of stories from her. I grew up hearing stories about my mother, as a child, as a teenager and as a young adult, in connection to different parts of our family’s history. That spurred an interest in me to begin to trace my own family’s history.

In terms of my dad, his family was from Kentucky. We were not very close to my father’s side of the family because of the distance. There were stories that I heard in my childhood that I just absorbed. It wasn’t until I learned how to begin to research genealogy that I began to ask more questions. I started when I was 13. By virtue of the fact that we lived in close proximity to Washington, DC, we had access to the local libraries out in the county and the suburbs, and these major research institutions in Washington DC. There is the concept of early exposure to certain environments that can help to guide a young person in a certain direction. I reflect upon my access to libraries and research institutions as being an important factor and influence in my ability to develop an interest in genealogy and to pursue it until the point that I became a professional in that field.

How did you become come to work in genealogy?

In terms of my work at the Smithsonian, that was a natural progression. When I was a child, we visited the library quite a bit. My parents had an extensive library collection at home. It wasn’t until I got older that I began to understand that they had an extensive collection of what was published by then on African American history. My father’s office was filled with science and education books.

It was a hands-off, hands-on kind of environment where we were always sneaking in to access his teaching supplies. We spent a lot of time in the library. As a kid, I remember going to the library and finding information. I had this belief that whatever I wanted to learn, I could eventually find a book in the library that would explain it. The local library was next door to my high school. I used to go there after school to do my homework; I call my mom and tell her that’s where I was going to be. I got started when I was 13 with genealogy, then I learned that I needed to learn about African American History and geography. After school, I was going to do genealogy after I completed my homework.

I remember my mother telling me a story about a great-uncle who worked on a steamboat that traveled from Virginia to New York. He worked in the dining hall and he was the famous person in the family at the time. This is someone who was born in the 1880s and lived until about the 1940s. His name was Willie Harris. She told me that some part of his history was recorded in a book, the history of this company he worked for, the Baltimore Steam Packet Company, which was the major form of transportation between Virginia and New York City when steamboats were the popular domestic form of travel on the East Coast.

She told me these stories, and I began to do research. I learned about interlibrary loans. I learned about the value of gaining access to libraries globally. Once I learned that I could borrow books from other libraries, I became keenly interested in accessing information. I found a copy of the history of the steamboat company. They identified the employees, which is a little unusual for the history of the company. On some of the pages I saw a reference to Uncle Willie, and then it identified his father. It said, between the two of them, they had been employed with this company for more than 40 years.

What that discovery did for me, and I can remember the moment, is like not just one light bulb, but a bunch of light bulbs went off in my head. I thought, Wow, if I just look long enough and hard enough in books, I may be able to find more information about my family. I was also excited because I’d heard my family talk about this Uncle Willie since I was young. It immediately helped me connect the past with the present. I was proud of the fact that I heard this oral history and I found a way to document it, to prove that it was true.

A year or so later was when Alex Haley’s book was published. There was a lot of focus on African Americans tracing their ancestry and making this connection to the past. At that moment, it solidified something in my mind: In the course of my life, I was going to spend a lot of time searching for proof of these family stories. That’s really how I got started. The library was the institution, the place where I was verifying information. I graduated from simply looking for evidence at public libraries to traveling with my mother to university libraries, the state archives and the National Archives.

By the time I graduated from high school, I had already graduated also into the early steps of tracing my ancestry. Whereas my peers were going to the beach and having fun during spring break, my parents gave me permission to travel from the suburbs into Washington, DC to conduct research at the National Archives, the Library of Congress and the Martin Luther King Library. I didn’t know at the time I was going to end up here, but the groundwork was laid when I was a teenager.

How did genealogy and research become your calling?

I started noticing when I went to the Library of Congress that most of the people around me were older. It dawned on me that if I start now, and I’m a teenager, by the time I’m old enough, I’ll be ahead of the game with my peers. When I was doing research, people were telling me how difficult it was for an African American to trace their ancestry. I thought to myself, Okay, so this is going to be a challenge, but if I put the time and effort, then perhaps by the time I’m in my 60s, I’ll be somewhere better off than I would be if I was just starting at that age.

The National Archives has been preserving the nation’s federal records since the 1930s, so they’ve got millions of documents, probably billions by now. I was in the genealogy mecca of the time — the Library of Congress is the largest library complex in the world. By it being this national resource, I also met serious researchers and scholars, and that helped me to develop and teach myself research skills.

I thought also to myself that the smartest thing for me to do would be to find a way to get a job in a library. By being a staff member, I would have access. It didn’t matter what kind of library I worked in, as long as I was close to the data and the information, that’s what matters. I used to call myself a salary patron. I’ve worked in different types of libraries — public, special libraries, academic — for about 25 years. All along, I saw that the salary that I was earning as the means of funding my research on my family history.

Was that the first thing that you focused on seeking out?

My full name is Hollis Lucretia Gentry. Very unusual name. Hollis is typically thought of by people as a male name, then Lucretia was an odd name. My mother told me that I was named after this ancestor. Her name was Lucretia Ann Mayhew Appleby Yule Sumner. She was my great-grandmother’s mother. The reason why she stood out was we had a person of Native American ancestry in the family and I was named after her. She was a long-lived relative of the matriarch of the family. This connected me to the past in a very unusual way.

I also learned that when she was born, there’s a story that there was an abolitionist who was very popular at the time, Lucretia Mott, the Christian mom of a Quaker. She was a member of the French Society and she was involved in the abolition of slavery. As a teenager, I spent some time researching her life to determine whether or not the story was true. The story was that when grandma Sumner was born, the next-door neighbor Lucretia Mott was visiting the area. So she was named after this abolitionist. Around that same time, I had been studying American history in school, and there was some coverage of abolition and slavery. In my mind, although we were being taught that African Americans were enslaved and they were poor, and all these negative things, what stood out for me was someone in my family was connected to this great historical figure.

It put me and my family in a different light than the narrative that I was being taught at school. That laid a foundation for me to look at history and challenge it, or to try to find the truth in whatever narrative that I was looking at. Because this ancestor identified as being Native American, or from a specific Native American tribe, in my mind, everything about our family that was different was somehow connected to this other ancestry. So I spent time not only looking for my African American ancestry, but Native American ancestry, and I spent an inordinate amount of time looking for evidence of her background. The other thing that stood out was she’s from New York. She was born in New York and she lived in New York until my third great-grandfather, on one of his naval tours, ended up in New York and they met. She married him and moved to the south and established a southern branch of the family.

What was the process of taking a DNA test like for you? And how did you feel when you discovered your long-lost relatives?

My grandma Sumner married grandpa Mills. Mills Sumner was born in slave, grandma Sumner, Lucretia, was born free. She was descended from the Shinnecock tribe of Long Island, New York. I learned the story of grandpa Sumner’s mother. Her name was Rachel Hodges. When I was about 16, I got my driver’s license. My mother didn’t drive, but once I obtained a driver’s license, I used to drive her all over the place. So we started visiting relatives more.

On Sundays after church, we would visit some of these elderly relatives who could not attend church. In the course of doing that, they would share stories. My mother had a phenomenal recall so she would start interviewing relatives about ancestors. On this one trip, this ancestor lived in Annapolis, Maryland. She was the fourth wife of one of grandpa Mills’ children. My mother kept asking her questions, and she said, “Hold on, wait a minute.” She went somewhere in the house and came out with a box full of photographs. In that box was this photograph of grandma Hodges, who was born in slavery, and she told us the story that grandpa Sumner was separated from his mother as a child, while he was enslaved. Grandma Hodges was sold somewhere south, separated from the family. When he came of age, he joined the Navy.

While he was on his naval tours, whenever he went into any southern port, south of Portsmouth, Virginia, which is where the family was based, he searched for his mother. He eventually found her. The oral history did not say where he searched specifically, or where he found her. But all I know is that he found her. When he found her, she had actually remarried and had another family. But he brought her back to Virginia. We didn’t have any details about the family, who may have been left in this other southern state. She lived until she died amongst her children.

This is a major reunification of what had been this family that was split during slavery. I didn’t have any details of what precipitated that separation, the manner of it, the exact timing or anything. And all I had was the photograph of grandma Hodges, grandpa Sumner. This relative also gave us a box full of photographs that included the enlistment papers, the rendezvous reports of grandpa Sumner as he enlisted in the Navy each year, and as he was released from service. It provided a few details, but nothing that told us about the story of grandma Hodges. So it took me 25 years to be able to find the background to anchor the family in documents: the federal census and the personal family papers. The family Bible that recorded grandpa Sumner’s marriage and the subsequent generations leading to us.

I’ve been searching since I was about 17 years old for the details of how the family was separated and how they came to be reunited. Fast forward to the late 1980s, I was at the National Archives learning about the different federal sources that were available for research on African Americans. There was a group of records called the Freedmen’s Bureau records. These were created by a federal agency that was created after slavery endedafter the Constitution was amended to prevent slavery from being legally practiced in this country.

This is around the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December of 1865. These records were created at the moment when people are beginning to emerge from the period of enslavement to freedom. I said to myself, I don’t care how long it takes. I’m going to search through these records until I find my family.

What I found was after Emancipation, the head of the family, who was Mills Sumner Sr, a house carpenter, enlisted himself with his children, or the children that were still minors who were living with him. About almost a decade later, the Mormon Church, under the auspices of their nonprofit genealogy agency, microfilmed records of another entity related to the Freedmen’s Bureau records, the Freedmen Savings Bank. They were searching for descendants of some of these bank account holders. The bank was a means of safeguarding the earnings of African Americans who had recently emerged from slavery.

Part of the impetus for this was to help preserve the pay that African American veterans or soldiers were receiving for fighting the Civil War. I was part of the descendant community and they gave me a CD that they created from these records. By then I had already found some other relatives in these records. I found my ancestor, grandma Hodges, was mentioned in a Freedmen’s Bank record in Atlanta, Georgia. It mentioned grandpa Sumner’s father, and it identified all of his siblings. It also identified a young brother, who was the person that the account was created for. He’s 11 years old and it showed that he was born in Virginia.

So that helped me to add some details to the timeline: If he’s born in Virginia, and they ended up in Atlanta, I at least know that grandma Hodges was part of the family back in the 1850s. I knew that that was a significant clue from which to work back. I haven’t found the answer yet. What caused her to be sold to the south? Or if she was actually auctioned? Or if she was inherited by someone who relocated to Atlanta? I don’t know. But the key part is the child for whom that bank account was created. His name was William Samuel Sumner.

I wonder from that point, what happened to him? I didn’t know anything about whether he stayed in Atlanta or returned to Virginia. He wasn’t part of the oral history. Some years later, I found the name of her second husband, who she united with in slavery. Slave marriages weren’t legal. I discovered that she also had a daughter with this second husband. I don’t know what happened to her. But I had this sense that William Samuel Sumner survived.

Two years ago, I convinced one of my aunts to take a DNA test. I had already taken a DNA test with Ancestry.com and I wasn’t getting any of the kinds of DNA results that I had expected. I started attending a lot of workshops with genetic genealogists. I started attending those workshops to figure out what to do with my DNA information. My parents and brothers are all deceased. I was able to get my youngest brother to take a DNA test before he died. I discovered that he had very different results in terms of matching with other people than I did. Though we did find some relatives in common, I was able to identify other cousins. My family tree consists of about 1500 relatives that span almost nine generations.

What have you learned about your family tree?

Compared to other parts of America, it’s tiny. There are some people who have 100,000 people on their family tree. But for a person who descends from enslaved people and some who weren’t enslaved, it’s somewhat large.

I started digging in the records for six months straight. Every single day, I’m looking through several thousands of DNA matches, and they don’t have any names that make any sense to me. I was using the Ancestry.com service. I had some specific goals: I wanted to see where in Africa my ancestors came from. I also wanted to determine if I could find any connection to the Native American ancestry. The other part was to face the genetic reality of slavery, or enslavement of my ancestors.

My admixture was showing I was 65% West African, and it wasn’t just one particular nation or place of origin. My maternal line traces back to the African origin or African Eve, which is somewhere in Central Africa, in the area where they speculate Homo sapiens originated, the Congo. Then 34% of my ancestry came from Europe, and I had this one percentage of Native American ancestry. Looking at my family, we span the color range from very fair to very dark complexion. We have relatives who don’t look like they’re African Americans, to those who there’s no doubt there is some African ancestry.

Looking at my results, I had to come to terms with the reality of what this was saying about my ancestry. All of those one thousand or so people on my tree are listed as African American. Yet, my DNA results are saying 30 percent of my ancestry is not African, knowing the reality of the history of that.

I could trace back to my great-great-grandparents, and in some instances, my third-great-grandparents. I was saddened for a while because of the junctures where I couldn’t trace my ancestry anymore were the same junctures where the predominant number of DNA cousins, people who share the same DNA with me, were not of African ancestry. In other words, so many generations back, I started having an overwhelming number of DNA cousins who are white, and I have no clue whatsoever how we’re connected.

For several months, I didn’t know how to handle that. Because I spent almost 30 years of my life tracing this difficult part. I was able to deal with the history of slavery, but I come to terms with the reality of the fact that some of my ancestors had been enslaved, and some of them haven’t. I was able to document how those who gained their freedom, how they gained it, before and during, or as a result of, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment ratification. I had dealt with all these difficult things, but I had not dealt with this other ancestry.

I also came to understand that these DNA results were telling me, or they were evidence of, a story that I couldn’t flesh out. I didn’t have any names for the connections I have all over the globe with my DNA results. The DNA cousins that are showing up all over the globe: people born in Iran, Turkey, China, the Philippines, the Caribbean, Russia. I remember thinking back to the Michael Jackson song, “We Are the World” for a while to pull myself out of the sad feelings.

If you look at it and take steps back, we’re all related. It’s just a matter of when and where your ancestors migrated and settled for a bit, and migrated again and mixed with other people. Whatever the divisions that we’re walking around with really don’t matter for our social interaction. We can broaden our perspectives. We can focus on the history, the experiences that we have, that might color our narrative differently. But for me, because I’ve been researching for so long, and because I’ve worked professionally in this area, I’ve come to see the commonalities. We all have families, we all have those origin stories. We all have colorful relatives, we all have successful wealthy relatives, we have poor relatives, we have struggling relatives.

If you can trace the ancestry, you’ll find similar themes. They may be colored by the environment, the nation, the culture, the identity of the individual, or the family, or the community or nation that they’re living in. But if you strip away all of that, define the commonalities through time. Once I reached that point, it helped me to morph into this other kind of genealogist to look for the commonalities first, and to try to pull out the nuggets of a story that I think are most useful, and to also find a way to connect with everybody.

In my work, I probably have become overzealous at times and sharing information. But I also take the time to listen to others. Sometimes when I’m in the presence of strangers, let’s say waiting in line at the Motor Vehicles Administration, we strike up, a conversation about whatever I recall of my mother, and find a way to strike up a conversation to find the commonalities with somebody. Inevitably, there will be a story about a family member immediately. There are all sorts of stories that we have about our relatives that shape how we see the world and how we interact with the world. Genealogy is literally the way to make those changes, to trace the connections. Family history is a little bit broader. That involves looking at genealogy, but genealogy in the context of your culture, your community, your beliefs, and everything. Then you can take the family history to broaden it to the community history, regional history, and national history. When you get to the level of the international, it opens the doors for people seeing themselves in different contexts. The world has become a lot smaller because people can migrate.

I sometimes have a different perspective on what it means to be a part of the family, and what the stories that I have inherited and retained mean. I look at it as a way of finding our commonalities. I also hope that by sharing the stories, I will inspire somebody else to do the same. Also in that sharing, I will learn something else about another family that will help me to become a better researcher, or will help me find a different way of reflecting upon my own family history and my ancestry.

Tune in to Episode #34, contact us at dividedfamiliespodcast@gmail.com and follow us at @DividedFamiliesPodcast.