Following the oral trail

My mother was recently rummaging through an old box of my great Aunt Lucy’s memorabilia when she found two pieces of paper, stapled together, with Aunt Lucy’s recognizable scribbling.

It reads: “Anderson Marrow, my great-grandfather, was half-white … the founder of Philadelphia Church … and his daughter, Rebecca married Sam Cross, who was part Indian from Connecticut, Hartford, Connecticut … and by him, she had four children – Anderson, Weldon, Lucy and Edith.”

“… He (Anderson) also gave the land and timber for the church to be built. My great-grandmother told me during slavery, a group of slaves would meet in the woods to sing praises to God. After that, the church was built.”

Many of us can say we grew up hearing these stories. I certainly did. But our elders didn’t seem to give historical meaning or context, so I couldn’t grasp their relevance. Instead, they dropped clues in such a lackluster way, I all but dismissed them as fantasy folklore.

Not anymore.

In recent years, I’ve discovered our Cross-Marrow elders left a trail of breadcrumbs that’s more like gold dust. They spoke in snippets -- torn bits of paper from the family book.  We have to listen carefully to sift the nuggets.

For instance, Aunt Henrietta (“Hen-retta”) Cross Hatton Clark once told me she suspected our ancestors were Pequots.  Our research into the Crosses has led us to a possible  connection with three New England Native American tribes: the Narragansett, Pequot and, maybe, the Wampanoag.

A Connecticut-based genealogist told us she found our family name while researching New England African-Native American families. She said she’s certain Abraham Cross came from a Narragansett family. She also suspects Amos Cross’ wife, Eliza, could be Pequot.

While we’re a little ways from definitively proving it, we’re close.

Where do we fit?

Historians and genealogists look to DNA to map human genetic origins and migration patterns. Well-known Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is helping to piece together African-Americans’ true composition. In his 2009 article, he suggests that DNA paints a different picture of our genetic origins than our oral traditions lead us to believe.

“Here are the facts: Only 5 percent of all black Americans have at least 12.5 percent Native American ancestry, the equivalent of at least one great-grandparent. Those “high cheek bones and “straight black hair” your relatives brag about at every family reunion and holiday meal since you were 2 years old? Where did they come from? To paraphrase a well-known French saying, “Seek the white man.”[1]

Besides our obvious African ancestry, we already know some streams of our bloodline lead to Europe. Like so many African-Americans families, we accept our elders’ beliefs that our range of skin and eye color comes from an elusive “Indian” relative. But, as Gates has proven, saying so doesn’t make it so.

Now, we’ve come across clues that may substantiate what our elders have been telling us all along. If that’s true, we’re among that tiny 5 percent of African Americans with Native American ancestry. Proving it could cast our family in a unique place in American, African American and Native American history.

That’s what I mean by context.

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[1] The Root, “Michelle’s Great-Great-Great-Granddaddy—and Yours

In defiance of law, social convention and what some “believe,” an enormous amount of “race mixing” has long been occurring in the U.S.”

 By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.  |  Posted: October 8, 2009 at 11:50 AM http://www.theroot.com/views/michelle-s-great-great-great-granddaddy-and-yours