Once again I am grateful for notice in this influential trade journal–read by book buyers for stores and libraries. Don’t be alarmed by the “Fiction” category–all poetry books reviewed in PW appear under that heading…though it seems particularly unsuitable for Trafficke. If I’d been willing to fictionalize, the project would have been a whole lot easier! Trafficke in Publishers’ Weekly
Author Archives: susantichy
Tempest in a Teapot? Or actual new information about Alexander Magruder?
Recently, someone in the Facebook Magruder/McGruder family genealogy group started off a long conversation with the following:
Alexander Magruder is no longer a “gateway ancestor” for the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne” [OCC] or for the descendants of Magna Carta Barons. Genealogists have determined that Margaret Campbell was not his mother, and she is the one who connected him to those lineages.
Subsequent discussion was not very enlightening, though group members who are also OCC members did try to find out more detail. All we know is that the OCC’s genealogist has made this determination, but apparently does not share with anyone the sources consulted or reasons for the decision. And, honestly, a genealogical claim without reference to sources isn’t worth the pixels it takes to type it. The OCC is also claiming a birth date for Alexander of 1630–fully 20 years later than has been believed. Again, no evidence offered. Are they just guessing?
Considering that several researchers, in several generations–most recently Don McGruther–have thoroughly searched public records in Scotland, and all concur that our Alexander was the son of Alexander McGrouther (senior) and Margaret Campbell, (widow of Andrew Drummond of Balmaclone)…my question was, and still is: does the OCC have access to a document or documents not available to the rest of us, or has the genealogist simply decided that the extant evidence is too skimpy to be sure of Alexander’s parentage? While the former would be big news, indeed, the latter would be no news at all–we’ve always known the record is scant. (See, on this site, Alexander’s Family Tree & Was Alexander Who We Think He Was?)
Personally, I don’t give a fig about descent from Charlemagne or the Magna Carta barons, but I’d be pretty darned excited to see actual new evidence about Alexander and his family. I hope OCC Magruders will keep the rest of us informed about any new developments or information.
In the meantime, I have to say that absent new evidence my beliefs about Alexander’s lineage remain unchanged.
If you haven’t joined the Facebook group, you’ll find a link at the right hand side of this page.
Upcoming readings from Trafficke
Here are my upcoming readings from Trafficke, in case you happen to be in any of these neighborhoods. Unless noted, all events are free and open to the public.
Read about Trafficke on my website http://susantichy.com/books/trafficke/ or the Ahsahta Press website https://ahsahtapress.org/product/tichy-trafficke/
In recent months I have read from and talked about Trafficke at a house reading/book launch in Washington DC, at a meeting of the DC chapter of Coming to the Table, in two readings at the AWP conference, at the Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society, at the University of Colorado/Colorado Springs, the University of Illinois/Springfield, George Mason University, a house reading in Illinois, at Busboys & Poets/Hyattsville, MD, at The Writers Center, Bethesda, MD, and at The Potter’s House, DC. Many thanks to those who turned out to support me, and to join the discussion.
Several readings have been shared with Karen Branan, author of The Family Tree (Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, 2016), her investigation of a “kinship lynching” within her family in Jim Crow Georgia. I’ve recently discovered that Karen, too, is a Magruder descendant. See my post for 12 March 2016. Read about The Family Tree on Karen’s web site.
Now it’s summer, when I literally head for the hills…so no events scheduled until Fall. Here are two to look forward to–
Monday, Sept 24, 3pm: Karen & I will be speaking at the Fall for the Book festival at George Mason University. Building & room: Research 163. Visitor parking: Mason Pond Deck. Joining us will be Anthony Cohen, an African American historian who has twice walked to Canada on routes of the Underground Railroad, and in 2014 followed in the steps of his great-great grand uncle, who returned from freedom in Canada to enlist for service in the Civil War. A documentary of that journey, Patrick & Me, will be released nationwide in 2018. Committed to embodied encounters with history, Tony both directs his own foundation—Button Farm Living History Center, in Germantown, Maryland—and serves as Director of Historical Interpretation at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, where he is developing an immersion program in the experience of the enslaved at Great Hopes Plantation.
No details yet, but Karen & I expect to be speaking in Baltimore in October…stay tuned!
Michael W. Twitty: I Can’t Hide Mine, Please Don’t Hide Yours: An Open Letter to Ben Affleck
By now (courtesy of WikiLeaks) most of the world has heard that when actor Ben Affleck appeared on Finding Your Roots, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., he persuaded Gates and the other producers to omit the revelation that his third great-grandfather, Benjamin Cole, owned slaves in Savannah, Georgia. For the show, it was a missed opportunity not only to illustrate the true complexity of our history but also to demonstrate that each of us has a choice in our own actions. Affleck’s slave-owning ancestor is on his mother’s side, while his mother herself was an activist who traveled to Mississippi during one of the most dangerous phases of the Civil Rights movement.
Among the hundreds of responses to the outing of Affleck’s secret, here is one of the best, by Michael W. Twitty at Afroculinaria. Even more amazing are the family stories posted in the comments that follow. Really, it’s like poking an anthill: just one good jab and the truth of our history comes pouring out.
Dear Ben,
Its unfortunate because of a massive internet hack we are in this particular place discussing your ancestral past. It’s horrible that your private matters were exposed because of something beyond your control. That’s untenable in any situation, but we need to address something right quick…this slavery thing. You were embarassed, and that’s reasonable given the situation and the circumstances that produced it. But Ben Affleck, take it from a Black guy; with a platform like yours, don’t you dare be embarrassed to come from an ancestor who held enslaved people. Because….We need to know.
I don’t think many Black people really understand the profound guilt, shame or embarassment some white descendants of slave holding families feel. It’s not just that many assume personal responsibility for the past or that they grasp that their privilege or power is not just based on perceptions based on skin color. Clearly these…
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Trafficke is here!
One day long ago, when the world and I were young, I sat down to write what I thought might turn into a 10 or 15 page sequence of poems about Alexander Magruder. I had three questions: who was he? what was he? and what, in 1652, was Maryland? Twenty years later, here is the result: 177 pages of historical narrative, prose poetry, and verse. When an interviewer asked me why I embarked on this tremendous journey, I wrote back: That’s like asking Frodo Baggins why he left the Shire! No one can predict where a path will lead.
Following my original three questions led me into deep darkness and strange light; to libraries and archives, farms and graveyards; to Scotland eight times; to new friends, new cousins, and kind strangers; to a theory about how and when and why American Magruders came to believe (and have so fiercely clung to) the idea that we are part of Clan Gregor; and to very hard truths about our Magruder legacy in the American south.
Fair warning! Trafficke is not your typical book of family history or genealogy. You may want to read an excerpt before parting with your hard-earned dollars. Find an excerpt at Apartment Poetry 5; or at Evening Will Come, where it appears with a short statement about other poets whose work influenced the inception of Trafficke.
From the book’s back cover:
“If ignorance is innocence / all is true all is false.” Thus Trafficke plows under the surface of our collective amnesia and unearths a family past–beginning in Reformation Scotland, ending in slavery’s abolition in Maryland–that is our American past. History and myth, treachery and self-preservation, prose and verse collide and change places, caught in the dialectic eddies and splinters of Tichy’s luminous formal invention. This is a work of piercing lyric intelligence and fearless heart. Trafficke changes all the rules. — Peter Streckfus
To help Trafficke become a small press best-seller, please purchase a copy at Small Press Distribution.
Or, if you would like a signed copy, contact me through this site.
For more about the book and its making, visit its very own Traffickeblog.
DNA for Genealogy
I recently had my DNA tested. After a little research, I chose Ancestry.com b/c 1) it’s easy to use; 2) huge number of family trees to match to (plus historical records to verify and document your tree); 3) they keep the DNA, so as technology improves you may get more results; and 4) the raw DNA data is easily downloaded, then uploaded to other sites with more powerful technical analysis tools.
I’ve uploaded my data to Family Tree DNA (for a moderate fee) and to GEDmatch.com (free). These allow you to match one-to-all (a fishing trip) or one-to-one (to zero in on someone who looks like a genuine match). I am barely beginning to understand it all, but am pleased so far.
Also, my family tree is complete (as far as I know it) on Ancestry and is public.
I have found the tutorials on the site linked below to be very helpful, including Lesson 2 which helps you figure out which company to start with. The answer may depend on where your ancestors were from, as well as what kind of information you are seeking. If you are looking for relatives within the time frame of a typical family tree, don’t skip the autosomal (atDNA). The others will take you back into deep time, but won’t show spouses, other children, cousins, etc., just a son-to-father-to-father chain or a daughter-to-mother-to-mother chain.
On the other hand, for African Americans searching for a white male ancestor, the Y-DNA test may be the most efficient way to start.
GEDmatch.com has a whole page of links for learning, under the title DNA for Dummies.
Thank you for a terrific year!
WordPress tells me that Magruder’s Landing received more than 7,000 visits in 2014! That’s more than a tenfold increase over 2013. I am truly astonished, and thank you all for your interest, your encouragement, and your willingness to share information, photographs, and sources. I’ll do my best to keep you coming back in 2015.
Trafficke arrives in March!
My new book, Trafficke, will be released in March by Ahsahta Press. Trafficke began in 1994 with a few simple questions: who, and what, was Alexander Magruder? And, for that matter, what was Maryland in 1652? Those questions, and the answers, have led me down many roads I could not have imagined when I set out. The resulting text travels through Scotland and Maryland, McGruther/Magruder family history, and the whole arc of slavery in Maryland, from the 1660s to Emancipation…and a little beyond.
You can read a description at SusanTichy.com, find an excerpt in the online poetics journal, Evening Will Come, and follow the book’s adventures on its very own website, Traffickeblog.com.
You can place a pre-order at Ahsahta Press or wait for it to show up on Amazon. Once the book is out, you’ll also be able to purchase a signed copy directly from me, or order it through your favorite independent bookstore.
What would America look like…
…if the contributions made by slaves in the building of this country were memorialized as we memorialize those who gave their lives in military service?
If their gravestones aren’t well marked and their lives continue to go unrecognized, there are new injustices every year. Why isn’t their suffering and contribution memorialized?… We should honor their service. We should honor the service, even if it was involuntary service, of those who contributed to our nation’s economies and acknowledge what they suffered and overcame.
Will Hairston, from Coming to the Table: A Collection of Stories
Coming to the Table (CTTT)
Slaves imprisoned in Baltimore to evade DC emancipation & Union Army recruiting
A followup to my post on DC emancipation petitions…
The following is a partial list of people who were jailed in Baltimore by slave owners hoping to evade the April 1862 D.C. emancipation and/or the Union Army’s recruitment of black soldiers in Maryland. (Slaves in Maryland were not emancipated until January 1864, when the state adopted a new constitution.) This snapshot shows page 337 of Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War, edited by Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, et. al. (The New Press, 1992). The correspondence from which the list was extracted is dated July 27, 1863, in Baltimore.
This volume is an extract from The Black Military Experience, Series 2 of the multivolume work Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (Cambridge University Press, 1982). The abbreviation in the last column notes the owners’ disloyalty to the Union, that being a condition for recruitment of their enslaved workers.
I will try to track down the rest of the list. Please write if you have the list or know where it can be found.
From _Free at Last_, ed. Ira Berlin et.al. The New Press, 1992.
For the benefit of those searching for ancestors, here is a searchable list of the names: Charles Dorsey, William Sims, Samuel Davis, John Francis Toodles, Henry Toodles, Henry Wilson, James Dent, George Hammond, Charles Foote, Michael Fletcher, Betsy Ward, Virginia West, Ellen J. Roberson, Lena Harrod, Rachel Harrod, Sophia Simmons, Martha Wells, Susan Collins, Willie [Collins?], Martha Clark.
I have checked the names of those from Prince George’s County. All but one of the slave owners’ names are familiar to me, neighbors and possibly kinfolk of Magruders. The surnames West and Clark also occur among those enslaved by Magruders in Prince George’s County and the District of Columbia.
Magruder's Landing 