Who Are Black Magruders & McGruders?

For black Magruders, McGruders, McCruters (and other name variants) there are three likely origins of the name: a blood relationship to white Magruders; adopting the name at Emancipation; or acquiring the name earlier, perhaps in the 17th or 18th century, and carrying it from then on, no matter where descendants ended up.

Not all black Magruders and McGruders are related to the Alabama Black McGruders featured on ABC’s Soul of a Nation. In the two Facebook groups, African American Magruder/McGruders or Magruder/McGruder Family Genealogy, you can connect with people currently searching for ancestors in Maryland, Virginia, Mississippi, Indiana, and elsewhere. Read through the old posts to see if anyone might be related to you, and post your own questions there. You’ll find a warm and helpful group of fellow searchers.

The Alabama Black McGruder tribe trace their families to Charles McGruder, Sr., who established a homestead in the Sawyerville area for his several wives and many children. Some of his descendants use other spellings, including McCruter. Charles’ parents, Ned and Mariah Magruder, were born in Georgia around 1795, on the plantation of Ninian Offutt Magruder. Ninian migrated from Maryland to Georgia in the early 1780s, along with his first cousin Ninian Beall Magruder. In Columbia County they joined an already established community of Magruders and related families, including the surname Drane, and all these families intermarried extensively.

Ned Magruder was the son of Ninian and an unknown enslaved woman. (When The Alabama Black McGruders book comes out, you can read speculations about who Ned’s mother might have been.) Ned and Mariah, along with their children, were taken to Alabama by Ninian’s youngest daughter, Eleanor Magruder Wynne. One of Eleanor’s brothers, Zadok, also settled in Alabama; the enslaved people he took with him have not been researched.

If your family goes back to either Georgia or Alabama, you might find DNA matches among the Alabama Black McGruder family. If you think you are directly related to them, post on one of the Facebook groups and one of the family members or researchers there will help you figure out the family tree.

If you get a DNA match, but are not descended from the Alabama family directly, there are at least two places you can start looking. If your family is from Macon County, your people may have come from the plantations of William Reardon Magruder, son of Zadock Magruder, who was Ninian’s son and Eleanor’s brother. If that doesn’t sound like your locale, you can start searching records pertaining to the slaveholding Magruder, Drane, and related families in Georgia. If you have traced your family back to, or close to, Emancipation, and/or you know where they were living, I might be able to help you identify some families to start searching. Georgia and Alabama records are relatively easy to use on FamilySearch.org (much better than MD records). Some of the Georgia Dranes and Magruders also migrated west into Mississippi, Kentucky, and elsewhere.

For information on the Alabama DNA project, contact Jill Magruder Gatwood by posting on one of the Facebook groups—African American Magruder/McGruders or Magruder/McGruder Family Genealogy. I cannot help you with the DNA project; if you write to me I will simply forward your message to Jill. I am happy to do this if you can’t use Facebook, though I urge you take the plunge and join these two marvelous groups.

The Alabama Black McGruders, on page and screen

13 Feb 2021: I’m excited to announce that a greatly expanded book by and about the Alabama Black McGruders is nearing completion. J.R. Rothstein, a family member and the principal author, has worked with a team of family historians and genealogists, other researchers, and editors, to craft and document this narrative of the family through multiple generations. I am honored to have worked on the manuscript, in a role that evolved into “lead editor” and sometimes “chief nag.” We expect publication, via Amazon, by the end of this month.

AND, if you want to be even more excited…a short segment on The Alabama Black McGruders will be featured in the first or second episode of a new ABC documentary series, The Soul of a Nation, airing Tuesdays throughout March. I haven’t received confirmation, but it seems the McGruder segment will air in the first or second episode, March 2 or March 9. Watch the preview! Lucille B. Osborne–one of those two beautiful McGruder women on the sofa–is a 95 year-old family historian, the soul of the book and of the McGruder story on camera. When Lucille was a child, she knew her great-grandmother, Rachel McGruder, who was born enslaved but went on to become one of the founding mothers of the family. Through her family stories, her research, and her inquisitive spirit, Lucille brings our shared history startlingly close.

Stay tuned for more info on both book & film.

And, BTW…if, like me, you have streaming but no t.v., you can ask a friend to set up a laptop in front of their t.v. and live-stream it to you. When a friend shares with me this way, she uses Facebook Messenger Video and can stream it to one person or a group.

Magruder-McGregor family papers

The Huntington Library–in San Marino, California, by Pasadena–has scanned and made public a small collection of papers from the family of Roderick McGregor. This is the younger Roderick, son of Nathaniel M. McGregor and Susan Euphemia Mitchell, and grandson of John Smith Magruder, who in 1820 changed the surnames of his children to McGregor in the mistaken belief that Alexander Magruder the Immigrant was a member of Clan Gregor in Scotland. I have written elsewhere on this site about Nathaniel’s brother, the first Roderick McGregor, and other members of the family, and of those they enslaved. (See John S. Magruder & McGregor Slaves, under Slavery’s Legacy.) The elder Roderick lived on and farmed their father’s plantation in Prince George’s County, MD, while Nathaniel was a businessman in Washington, D.C.

The heart of the Huntington collection is a group of family letters from 1860-1862 (+ one each from 1857 & 1864). By that time, the elder Roderick had died and Nathaniel’s family was living at the plantation. Nathaniel himself went back and forth between “home,” as he calls it in the letters, and his official residence in a business district of Washington, D.C. Nathaniel’s son, the younger Roderick, was attending the brand-new Maryland Agricultural College, now the University of Maryland, and his absence from home occasioned the exchange of numerous letters with this father, mother, and siblings. The few surviving letters are deeply interesting, containing snippets of family life, with mention of a few of the family’s enslaved laborers, house servants, and runaways (including some identified elsewhere in family wills and estate papers). Here, too, are the various anxieties of wartime–approach of the war, efforts to find a political compromise, Union troops in the neighborhood, closed bridges and check-points, unrest among the enslaved, and, finally, a prediction that the plantation will yield no harvest as slaves begin leaving and Emancipation approaches.

We learn, too, that Roderick was nearly killed in some sort of accident in 1857; that one of his sisters was thrown from an overturning carriage; that his mother Susan (who had given birth ten times, with seven living children aged 12-31) was often unwell; that one young woman in the family’s social circle was “the most affected creature” ever seen; that the parents were religious and worried that Roderick was not; that Nathaniel generally frowned on the theater, but allowed his daughters to attend an adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy; and that Uncle Alerick (another of Nathaniel’s brothers, a school teacher) “has recovered from his frolic.” Sadly, we never find out what that frolic included, only that a man of his age should have known better.

I am working on updates to Magruder’s Landing, and will include some excerpts and analysis of the contents of the letters, but in the meantime you can read them yourself, right here: McGregor Family Correspondence.

Names in the letters include: Nathaniel Mortimer McGregor; his wife Susan Euphemia Mitchell McGregor; their children Helen Woods McGregor Ewell (Roderick’s oldest sister, married to her first cousin, John Smith Magruder Ewell), Margaret Eliza McGregor (married to her first cousin John Ridout “Ridy” McGregor, son of Alerick McGregor & Martha Potts Key); Susan Euphemia McGregor; Isabella “Bell” McGregor (later married to Thomas Somerville Dorset); Roderick Mortimer McGregor (later married to Margaret Elizabeth Bowie, d/o Richard Bowie, a relative); Agnes Woods McGregor (later married to Thomas Trueman Somerville Bowie, another relative); John Francis McGregor (later married to Frances Ellen Wallace); Susan E.M. McGregor’s brothers William Mitchell and John Mitchell (Uncle William & Uncle John); John Ridout “Ridie” McGregor; various neighbors and acquaintances; enslaved men Jack Bowie, Ned [Dodson], John Henry, George, & Sam; enslaved woman Bity or Bittie.

The collection also includes some later family material (up to the 1980s), a photograph of Roderick, and two of his report cards from the MAC.

Samuel Magruder’s Patuxent Tobacco Ship

Duncan McGruther sent a message a few days ago:

Alexander the Immigrant left an eighth share of the ‘Patuxent Tobacco ship’ in his Will. Has anyone come across this vessel? Or details of where it berthed, or the other shareholders? I assume it was not seagoing and confined its activities to collecting and accumulating tobacco from growers on the Patuxent, but if so where was its home port and where did it deliver to for onward transmission across the Atlantic.

I don’t know of any record pertaining to the tobacco ship, which appears in the 1710/1711 will of Samuel Magruder, Alexander’s oldest known son. He appears to have owned a one-fourth interest in the ship, as he bequeathed one-eighth each to his sons Alexander and Nathaniel. We know Alexander the Immigrant owned the tobacco landing (shipping point) for which this website is named, and it’s likely that business accounted for much of his prosperity, as he made money there even when the (notoriously unstable) price of tobacco was down. That business-sense seems to have passed to his wealthy oldest son, who owned town lots in Marlborough as well as numerous plantations.

The Patuxent is silted in & shallow these days, but in the 17th c. was both wider & deeper, navigable for ocean-going vessels. They anchored mid-channel & sent smaller boats to the landings to take on hogsheads of tobacco. I have not read much detail about those operations, but always assumed the ships used their own small boats. It could have been the opposite, I suppose, with each landing sending out its own boat. However, since his shares of the “Pertuxson Merchant ship” were named & bequeathed as an item in Samuel’s will, separate from any real estate, my assumption would be that he owned it jointly with other growers/shippers & that it collected tobacco up & down the Patuxent for transport to Magruder’s or other landings. It is also possible the ship transported other commercial goods.

A tobacco warehouse stood at the Magruder site until it was burned down by the British in 1814, during what we Americans, for some reason, persist in calling The War of 1812. Was the Patuxent already silting up Samuel’s time, so this river-going ship was needed to transport tobacco and other produce down to the river mouth?

Can you answer that question, or do you have other detail about the operations of the tobacco landings and transatlantic ships? If so, please get in touch via the Contact tab on any page of this site.

[This post was corrected after I checked the wills of Alexander & his son Samuel, confirming my recollection that it was Samuel, not his father, who owned shares in the ship.]