19/04/2024
It’s taken me a little while to process all of my feelings about last week’s experience at Lindenwald, but I think I’m ready to share. We were at a conference at the home of President Martin Van Buren for two days, discussing the legacy of Black families who had once been enslaved on the property (most of them by the property’s previous Van Ness and Van Alstyne owners). The folks at Lindenwald commissioned a research study of the enslaved and their descendents. As you know, our research at the Archive is genealogy based, so, while they worked from the past forward, we work from the present toward the past. And when the lines of research connected, I, quite unexpectedly, found myself to be a descendent on more than one of the family lines.
Now, I’ve been doing this work, researching Black residents and checking out historic buildings, for a few years. Sometimes I’m looking at my own ancestors, and sometimes I’m tracing completely unrelated people. But, somehow, this experience was different. Walking on those floorboards where my ancestors walked, touching a piece of furniture that they touched, stepping on the cellar cobblestones where they (presumably) slept, I felt a whole range of emotions that I didn’t know what to do with. I wasn’t angry, or sad, but I wanted to cry. I felt rooted, yet untethered. I felt invigorated, yet weighed down. I wanted to sit on the floor and feel the energy of my ancestors wash over me like a tide. I wanted to lay down in the field and touch the stones above their graves (lol, but it was raining and I was trying to be professional!). More than anything, I wanted to let them know that we survived, that we persevered, and that we are doing everything we can to honor their legacy and their memory.
📷: 1. Cobblestones in the cellar of the original section of the house. Research indicates that the enslaved may have slept on pallets on top of these stones.
2. The area of the farm where our ancestors may be buried.
My own pictures.