Finding My Family: Part 1
My grandfather was obsessed with tracing our family history. At holidays, once we’d been stuffed to the brim with Memomma’s chicken, potatoes, broccoli, pecan pie, Papa would start droning on about something or another he’d found about our ancestry. Once, he claimed he’d traced us back to Patrick Henry. Another time, he said he’d found some link that made him think my parents might actually be related by marriage long distance.
We all humored him, nodded, mmhmmed, said “That’s real neat, Papa.” Behind him, out of sight, Memomma would make mocking faces, breaking her southern wife character. If he turned around as we giggled, she’d smile big and pretty, wink at us once his back was to her again.
He had stacks and stacks of papers in binders. There wasn’t as much that was digital back then, but what he did have, he stored on a hard drive. I’d go back into his office to email my friends, and the amount of papers and research material he had strewn around the office gave me anxiety even then. I wanted to clean it all up, throw it all away. Who cares?
I wasn’t too interested in researching my family until I started trying to write about my mama’s family my first year in graduate school. Some visit or another in Mississippi, somebody’d told me how my great-grandmama on Mama’s side had died “from shock therapy in an insane asylum.” Turned out to be the same institution that used to sit close to downtown Jackson, where back in 2014, the hospital had been doing some construction and unearthed coffins and remains of mental patients from almost a century before.
I found out real quick the timelines didn’t match up for her to be among those graves, but all the same, it made for a good plotline for my thesis novel. (It’s still sitting in a drawer. The last agent who responded to it said the plot was more developed than the characters, and she wasn’t wrong.)
My great-grandmother was Mattie Melissa Rogers Delk Barber. That’s on my mama’s side, but her two last names are the last names of my great-grandfathers on both sides. She divorced my great-granddaddy, a man named Buford Delk who, from what I’ve heard, wasn’t exactly the nicest man. After him, she married a man named Joseph H Barber. My father is Joseph Henry Barber III. But her JH Barber sure wasn’t my dad’s father or his either, and he was from up in Mount Olive, further north in Mississippi than either of my parents’ families.
I’ll never know for sure, but I think the dangling Joseph H Barber that I can’t quite seem to connect to my dad’s Barbers is what Papa found. I wish I could ask him. I wish I could sit down with him and listen while he rattled on about every ancestor he’d found. Took me months, but I tracked down his hard drive, about the only bit of his research we hadn’t tossed when he died. It’s so old that I can’t figure out how to get it to connect to anything I have.
My father is a carbon copy of his father. He can’t quite see it, but everybody else can. He believes all kinds of things I don’t. I’m friends with all kinds of people he don’t think should be allowed to live the way they want to. Or where they want to. We don’t have a whole lot in common, and it’s hard to find things to talk about that don’t piss one of us off somehow. My sister and I are visiting for the first time in months, and we’re both nervous. But when she arrived from the airport, my dad and I almost didn’t look up because we were knee-deep in a box of my grandfather’s things he’d found in the attic.
My partner thinks I have hoarder tendencies, and the truth is, he isn’t wrong, and it comes from my father’s side of the family. They don’t get rid of anything. We have furniture that belonged to family 3-4 generations back. Until just a few years ago, I was setting my coffee down on my great-grandmother’s coffee table and eating from her dining room table with her china cabinet behind me, displaying my Memomma’s favorite china. They’ve been working on throwing more and more stuff away, my father and his wife, but they’ve still got an entire room just about filled with boxes of baby clothes, papers, kitchen odds and ends.
We stayed in that box for hours, me and my dad: spreading photographs across his kitchen table, pulling out loose diary entries my grandmother wrote, leafing through an anniversary album celebrating my great-grandparents’ 50 years together. There were pictures in there from when I was little all the way back to when my grandfather was in high school. There were pictures of him with some woman who isn’t my grandmother, pictures of my great-grandfather hanging out of a dorm room window at Mississippi State. There was a photograph of the English department building at MSU where I went to grad school and taught for 3 years.
And there was a certificate for the Barber coat of arms. It’s red and yellow, fleurs-di-lis in a triangle. No animals. We’re loyal, it says. Steadfast. It mentions several famous Barbers, dating back to the 1200s, and get this: one of them is called John Barber and he was in the clergy connected to the Great Matter of Henry VIII. And I get this idea—what if I could trace my lineage back to some connection with Anne Boleyn? What if the reason I’m so obsessed with the late middle ages, with early modern England, is because I’m from there? What if my mind doesn’t remember, but my spirit does? My DNA?
Maybe there’s no such thing as DNA memory, past lives, or rebirth. But I like the ideas, the thoughts. They’re things I choose to believe in.
I created a MyHeritage account because some website ranks it the best one. I started adding family members, pulling from articles we found in my grandfather’s things. In this one article, we move from Mississippi backward in time through Georgia, and then to North Carolina. I can’t help but wonder then, too, if maybe this is the same reason I fell in love with the coast of North Carolina as quickly and seamlessly as I did England. Maybe I came from there, too.
As we drive around Mississippi that weekend, Dad tells me stories his father told him about our family. Rumors he heard about an aunt and a secret child no one believed could have existed. The general store his grandfather owned in Harperville. All the siblings my grandmother’s mother had I didn’t know about. He starts situating names I’ve heard a hundred times and never thought to ask more about on the right place in the family tree: Ocie and Ordy and Mozelle. We don’t have a whole lot to talk about, me and my dad. But we can talk about this. He loves telling stories, and I love hearing stories. And lately, I find myself wondering more and more where I came from and how our family got here. I never cared about knowing that before, and now that I do, there’s a hundred million things I wish I could ask my grandfather. It’s the first time I’ve ever truly ached from missing him, if I’m being honest.
Dad told me stories about Frank Asberry, about how some of our ancestors were connected to the Wesley foundation. How Uncle Sidney traced our family back that far, but he and Papa got stuck there. They don’t know how we got here, where we came through or when from where in Europe. Papa said once he’d traced us back to Patrick Henry, but no one knows where that research ended up. Was it printed out? If it was, we threw it away. Was it on a flash drive? If it was, do we still have it? Was it on his iPad? (Probably not, he could barely work his desktop half the time.)
Dad said a few years back, something happened to Frank Asberry’s headstone. Uncle Sidney called somebody, organized something, got a replacement approved. He insisted they have a service for him, a proper burial to send off their respects, even though he died 100 years ago.
Uncle Sidney asked my dad and my Uncle David to go with him to say prayers because they’re both pastors. Uncle Sidney said at the end, he wanted to sing “Dixie” all together as a family, but Dad and Uncle David told him they wouldn’t do that. My Aunt Beth wanted to attend, but she was too far away in Richmond, and our cousins are in Kentucky and Nashville, so they live streamed the service through Zoom. Dad and Uncle David said their prayers. They sent Frank Asbery off—to wherever it is he ended up. And then, without warning, Uncle Sidney started singing “Dixie” at the top of his lungs into the Mississippi sky. Dad said one by one, they all peeled off, walked away, left him there in his suit, singing to our dead ancestor.
I worry about this when I think about researching my family. There’s one photo Dad and I pulled out of a box that looks so disturbingly creepy, I laughed out loud, tucked it in my purse to take home to show my partner. That night, the thought of that photo being in my bedroom felt like a darkness hanging across me. I took it downstairs and shoved it back in the box. When I showed my sister, she said, “They look like the kind of bitches who owned slaves.” She isn’t wrong except for that they look too poor to have owned slaves, but I know what she means: there’s this piercing in all of their eyes. Maybe it’s the flash of an old camera. Maybe it’s worn photograph paper. Either way, they look like they came straight from a horror movie.
But I know that whatever I find, I am different than they are. Whatever Mississippi relatives I had fight on whatever side of whatever war, movement, scripture, law, I am not like them. But I want to know who they are, where I started, where we came from. I think about my partner can’t do this, how often folks in town ask him if he’s related to the Motts of Mott’s Channel and he replies, “Yeah, I believe their ancestors owned mine.”
Ciciero once said that “to be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.” I believe that’s true. I don’t believe everything I find about my family will be lovely. Maybe I’ll even wish I hadn’t known. But to be better, you have to know what came before.
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”
I know we came from England. I know that somehow in my bones, and I know we came through North Carolina. I have a hunch we came through Wilmington. And I believe somewhere, somehow, one of my ancestors witnessed the ascension of Anne Boleyn to the throne of England and the dismissal of Katherine of Aragon. Somehow, I want to prove all of that.