I scrolled through Ancestry.com, finding names upon names, birthdates upon birthdates. Each piece of information was being filed into my brain. As a self-proclaimed information enthusiast, I continued to search for the answer to the question: who is my tribe?
It’s human nature to want to belong to a group, and we generally want to know where we came from because it helps to shape our identity. But not everyone has the luxury of knowing who their ancestors were, where they lived, or their intricate histories, culture or tribe of origin.
In the last episode, we talked about desiderium. The ardent longing for something once had. A few years ago, while I spent the dog days of summer looking for information on the names of those who came before me, I realized something.
I will never meet my ancestors.
I know, how profound!
But truthfully, as I read their names across the screen, researched their listed occupations and threw their census addresses into Google Maps, I felt a sense of satisfaction. I had more answers than before.
But I also had a weird feeling that I didn’t have a name for. It was similar to desiderium, but it was a longing to know more about the people and things I had never known.
So… what is the word for the longing for something you’ve never had, someone you’ve never known or will never meet?
In 2012, John Koenig created the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a dictionary for words not yet in the English language, but describe familiar emotions.
Anemoia is one of them.
Defined as the longing and love for something you’ve never known, I like to think of anemoia as a word sibling of desiderium. And it is the closest word to summarize what began to fill my heart as I explored the pieces of my ancestry puzzle.
When I first drafted this piece, I hadn’t discovered very much about my ancestors. In later works, we’ll discuss my family’s most up-to-date findings. But for now, I’ll share how it felt when I first started building my family tree.
The transatlantic slave trade refers to the brutal and tragic forced migration of people from their respective tribes — mostly from West Africa to the Americas.
That’s where my ancestry story begins. That’s where the story for most Black people in the Americas and Caribbean also begins.
En masse, the African people who were forced into slavery were stripped of their humanity and their identity. Tribes were mixed, languages, names and cultures removed. Families torn apart. The enslaved people were treated as property.
For those of us who are descendants of those who were enslaved, there is little documentation to trace our lineage back to. On the occasion that enslavers kept records, they wouldn’t list names. And if names were listed, they were often derivatives of the enslaver’s name, or different from prior and future references of that person.
As a result, a lot of information from prior to the first census in 1870 is hard to come by and interpret, especially by a non-expert like me.
This is the reality of many Black families in America with ancestry that traces back to slavery.
But, my family was able to identify our great-grandfather five times going back, which would be our great-great-great-great-great grandfather. He was born in the late 1700s, and at one point was listed in one of the British Colonies Slave Registries for Jamaica. His birth place is listed as Virginia, and he eventually returned to the United States. According to Ancestry DNA information, Virginia is also where at least half of my family’s lineage on American soil begins.
The amount of satisfaction that filled my heart was in tandem with the heartache that truly materialized the reality of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in the United States.
Growing up, of course I learned about the atrocities of slavery and acknowledged its significance in my personal history as a Black American.
But to have names — records of people who I likely have some distant traits of — is sobering.
I don’t know if I’ll ever fully be able to grasp that.
Everything I’ve learned about Black history has become a lot personal. The saying “I am my ancestors’ wildest dream” takes on a whole different meaning.
Most of my ancestors from immediate post-slavery were listed in the U.S. Census as not being able to read or write. And here I am, with a bachelor’s degree.
I have so many questions and zero answers. For the inner journalist in me, it’s frustrating. When scouring the internet for traces of documentation for the people I found, I often end up with dead ends.
What did Caroline look like? Did my 3x great-grandfather like having a twin?
When I did a Google Earth search of the properties that were listed in the Census, it provided a more complete understanding that these names weren’t just names. I saw the properties where houses once stood, and some plots of land still have houses that are now obviously occupied by other people.
Although I’ve found fragments of my ancestry story, I thought that these answers would help me feel complete in my ethnic identity. But they don’t. There are still a lot of unanswered questions, untraced relatives and lost histories.
And honestly, I think that’s okay.
As a kid I used to watch Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr. on PBS, and the stories that unfolded were always interesting. I remember seeing them pull out old photos of people from the guest’s lineage with updos and vintage day dresses. I admired the way they had been able to decipher the cursive on the Census records.
Growing up, I longed to be able to say I was from one of the 54 countries of Africa. To be able to go up to a map and pin something other than the United States of America. I wanted to be able to give some sort of well-received migration story, like most of my peers could.
I remember anxiously trying to prepare for the crickets and uncomfortable air of silence that was bound to happen the moment the word slavery flew out my mouth.
While I have experienced insensitive inquiries about whether I have a cool ancestry story, I fret not.
There’s nothing to be ashamed of about my ancestors being enslaved, or even the fact that I don’t have all the answers. Along with my summer genealogy journey came heightened pride. Although the records didn’t fill my entire family tree. I can be content with the history of those who came before me.
My family tree may never complete. I may never know the exact place all of my ancestors were torn away from, I may never learn the rest of their names, I may never know their tribe.
But what I do know is that I have something from them, even when I don’t realize it.
In those moments when they were forced to step out of the way in public, rejected from white spaces, when they were in literal bondage and held captive on ships and plantations, when they were demeaned and belittled, when they were harassed, humiliated and disrespected, they were bearers of something that was passed to me.
Or else I wouldn’t be here.
Resilience and resistance. They kept moving forward, and so will I.
