A Legacy Almost Lost

Transcript

The house at 11 Nelson Avenue in Harrison, NY, was for many decades the center of activity for Carol Smith-Ubosi and her extended family. It's where they gathered for major holidays, summer cookouts, and Sunday supper after service at the All Saints Episcopal Church just down the road. Smith-Ubosi's maternal grandmother, Mary Bell Potter, and her sister, Florence Bell, purchased the dark-brown shingled Colonial in 1918, and later, her grandfather, Clifford Potter, bought the lot next door to ensure plenty of space where the children could play games like kickball, croquet, and archery. There was, for a while, a small chicken coop and garden.

By the time Smith-Ubosi came along in the late 1940s, her grandfather was living in the three-story home with his second wife, two uncles, and three aunts. During her frequent visits, she spent most of her time playing with cousins on the first floor or outdoors. On the rare occasions when she went up to the third floor, she gave little thought to what mysteries the two eaves on either side of her uncles' bedrooms might hold.

A Treasure Trove of History

Fast forward to 1989, the house was being cleared out in preparation to be sold. When Smith-Ubosi's mother, May Bell Smith, went to check on the progress at the house, she found the contents of four trunks that had been in the eaves, filled with the kinds of historic documents and artifacts that many African American families can only dream of. And they were in a state of disarray.

"Everything was scattered on the floor, about to be thrown out. There were several family Bibles, including one with an 1823 manumission document; clothing; hundreds of letters; deeds; a ledger; gold coins; and photo albums," Smith-Ubosi recalled. "She had some tote and shopping bags in her car that she put everything in and brought them home to New Rochelle." The documents and artifacts apparently belonged to the Purdy, Bell, and Potter families, which, thankfully, her father kept after he remarried. Smith-Ubosi is grateful that her mother understood their value.

Theirs was not a family that discussed its ancestry much, but on holidays when the dead are traditionally memorialized, such as Veterans Day and Memorial Day, they would visit the historic African-American Cemetery in Rye, New York, where their ancestors, from as far back as the Civil War and a little before, are buried. "The significance didn't resonate with me until I was an adult," Smith-Ubosi said.

A Genealogical Journey Begins

Upon her mother's death in 1989, Smith-Ubosi brought the artifacts to her home in Silver Spring, Maryland, but did not turn her attention to the collection until she retired ten years later. She is working on having them preserved, transcribed, and digitized. Smith-Ubosi is particularly intrigued by 210 letters written between 1883 and 1886 that provided the foundation for a courtship between her great aunt, Harriet Bell of Pine Plains, New York, and Fred Smith of Norfolk, Connecticut.

Everybody enjoys a good love story, but what moved Smith-Ubosi most about the correspondence was how it not only created such a complete picture of their lives, but also illustrated how free Harriet felt to express her wants and needs.

"He really wanted to get married and she was really hesitant. I also think that she was really for women's rights. In one letter, which I thought was very poignant, she told Fred that if they did marry, he must never talk down to her like her white employer spoke to his wife," said Smith-Ubosi. In other letters, Harriet confessed uncertainty about her feelings for Fred and also shared advice about industries and places in which he might seek employment. "She was really assertive for a 23-year-old," Smith-Ubosi noted.

A New Perspective

The item that surprised Smith-Ubosi most was the 1827 manumission document, which emancipated a man known only in the document as "Lewis," because she had no idea that any of her ancestors had been enslaved. Like many people who've been raised and educated in the North, she believed that slavery was the domain of the South and that all of her ancestors had been born free, "because unless someone teaches you otherwise, you make that assumption."

In October 2012, Smith-Ubosi donated the document to the Jay Heritage Center located in New York's Westchester County, where she grew up. The center frequently hosts school groups, "and as a former teacher I felt that children need to know their history," she said.

The contents of the eaves have led Smith-Ubosi on a genealogical journey to different states. She has learned about ancestors she was previously unaware of and made new connections with extended family. Recognizing that not many Black families have similar troves in their attics, she advises one way to get started tracing their family history is to interview the oldest members of the family so they can share what they know.

"This experience has taught me a lot about how it's important to save everything, to really go through things, to archive and organize them, and to contact relatives that you don't know," advises Smith-Ubosi, who through her research has grown close to family members, including Harriett and Fred's third-great grandson, she "probably would not have known if not for those letters."