Roots was compelling and innovative television for its time. There was never anything like it up until 1977 nor anything like it since.
I was too young to understand most of it the first time I watched it, but I remember a couple of fights breaking out in my elementary school during the week it was on TV. Back then there were few channels, so whatever came on the night before, everyone watched it.
As I grew older, I developed an appreciation for it, even after Alex Haley was accused of plagiarizing parts of the book. He paid $650,000 to Harold Courlander, author of The African, to settle a plagiarism lawsuit. Stanley Crouch wrote a scathing column about Haley. Also see Thomas Sowell’s article.
Every time I watch the movie, I’m saddened, not just because of its depiction of slavery or heavy melodrama. I think about “lost” relatives I’ll never know about. And I always cry during one of the last scenes, a series of flashbacks of all the couples getting married, from Haley’s parents in 1920 to the marriage of Kunta “Toby” Kinte and his wife Bell (played by the late great Madge Sinclair) in the late 1700s.
Wishing I knew about my ancestors is probably why I’m fascinated with the history of the British Monarchy, where ancestry can be traced back to at least the 11th century.
I was reminded of Roots yesterday when I saw an article about Islamic ancestry, written by a genealogist named Nathan W. Murphy. It’s no mystery that many of the West Africans captured and sold into slavery (by their Islamic brothers?) were probably Muslims.
Unless families, especially black families, keep very good records, it’s difficult to trace ancestry beyond three or four generations. Time and money required for doing research are limited for most. And there’s that pesky day job, bills and other obligations.
In my case, reliable knowledge of my ancestry goes back no further than my great-grandparents on both sides. Companies like African Ancestry, Inc., use DNA testing to trace genetic ancestry to a particular African country. It’s as close as many of us will get to finding our Kunta Kinte.
I have a question for readers and commenters. How deep is your family tree?
Hi La Shawn,
Well, my mom was able to trace several branches of my family tree pretty far back…on my mom’s mother’s side we were able to trace our family back to the 1700s in Scotland — they were part of the Keppoch Macdonalds. Mackillop was the family name. But they fled to America in 1746 — after Scotland got defeated by England for the last time. Our records also say that they fought in the Revolutionary War, which is amazing!
On my mom’s father’s side, they were Jews from Lithuania. One branch of the family came to America (our branch), and another branch went to Israel, where we now have cousins.
On my dad’s father’s side, our family name is White, and it’s a family legend that our ancestors came over to America on the Mayflower in 1620! I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but I like to think so.
There are a lot of different lines on my father’s side; there are German, English, Swedish, Scottish, and countless other origins. I’m not as familiar with those lines.
Now I live in Santa Rosa, California, and here I intend to stay!
Shayne
Comment by Shayne — 07.22.04 @ 12:39 pm
Your my first commenter! Welcome!
Comment by La Shawn — 07.22.04 @ 1:00 pm
One Grandfather came over on the Norwegian fishing boat he was on when the Nazi’s invaded in 1940.
One grandmother was a Scots-Irish immigrant from a farm family that fled the potato famine.
One Grandfather was a half-breed Cherokee leaving a huge wake of unknown regarding the ancestory of both halves.
One Grandmother traces back to the Revolutionary war to Scots immigrants but brings in French/Dutch/English via intermarriage.
I’m a brown-eyed mutt who looks like his Norwegian Grandfather…
In other words…
An American.
Comment by DANEgerus — 07.22.04 @ 3:47 pm
My father’s side goes back to Benjamin Bass in Virginia during the American Revolution. There were some Basses in Massachusetts at an even earlier date, but no one has succeeded in linking the Massachusettts Basses with the Virginia Basses. Got that?
On my mother’s side, my greatgrandmother came to America from Paisley, Scotland in the 1850’s, which speaks very highly of my greatgrandmother, in my opinion. Paisley is a nicer place now, but it was a grimy textile mill in those days.
Comment by Douglas — 07.22.04 @ 4:00 pm
I loved the movie Roots. I have watched it at least 6 times.
My son did a study of our family tree. I had a mutiple great grandfather fight in The Revolutionary War. He was paid with farm land, that is in Cooks Co. Pa. I had a great, great grandfather fight in the Civil War. His name is on the honor roll at Gettysburg, Pa. These are on my mother’s side. My father’s side were immigrants that came to America, from Hungary, through Ellis Island.I could go on…..but anyway… Nice site!
Comment by Cathy — 07.22.04 @ 5:18 pm
Not all that long, have some broken branches due to my mother being adopted and my paternal grandfather being adopted. What we know so far is mostly German and Irish immigrants, and my Grandfather was definitely Native American, however he was adopted, so we have no real documentation of that fact, only his appearance. It is an interesting subject, always a good conversation starter.
Comment by Heather — 07.22.04 @ 6:26 pm
It’s very important for people to know their history. A very old and basic Communist doctrine is to render a population totally ignorant of their heritage, thus making them much more susceptible to brainwashing and indoctrination.
My grandfather(Dad’s side) wrote down a detailed account of family beginnings. His father, as his large family in Poland fell upon very hard times, left home together with his twin brother at age 13. His brother joined a traveling circus, but my great-grandfather went down to Copenhagen and signed aboard a merchant vessel as a cabin boy. He lived at sea until he reached 18 years, at which time he joined the British Navy. The ship’s captain, being a stuffy Englishman, objected to the name Layos Proschowsky, and so changed the name in the ship’s roster to Louis Robertson. For reasons I still don’t know, he kept that English name for the rest of his life; hence our family name.
After finishing his time in the Navy, he formed a partnership with another man and bought a sloop, securing an 8-man crew, and spent the next 8 years trading at various ports around the world, particularly in the Carribean and around Mexico. After selling the sloop, he settled down in Sinaloa, Mexico, married a German(I think) girl as time went on, and my grand father was born there in Los Mochis. When Papa- as we called him- was 16, he went north for an education- hidden undercover in a wagon, as Zapata’s Socialist revolutionaries considered any Americans fair targets. In Orange County, Ca. he met, and later married my grandmother, and some years later in 1925, they moved from Los Mochis to the valley of Simi in California, which is now the city of Simi Valley.
And we’re still here.
God bless one and all…
Comment by Jim Robertson — 07.22.04 @ 6:30 pm
1. I’m liking the new digs. I’ll probably inbox you about the process of moving everything over.
2. I just talked to my pop about this last week. We may be in some of the “Nat” Turners, but it’s hard to know, since the living Turners at that time tended to dissociate themselves from him for safety’s sake. That would be hot, though!
Comment by avery — 07.22.04 @ 7:34 pm
Pretty deep, lotsa generations. At one point I did some serious family history digging.
I made an ancestor chart (me, parents, grandparents, g-grandparents, etc.). On a whim, I highlighted in orange the people who were born in America. In general, you’d expect to find a lot of immigrants, which is true enough on my father’s side. But on my mother’s side, it was an absolute flood of orange (American-born) people, going back solidly for 6 or 7 generations. It was almost weird; did they research each other’s ancestry or something?
(not the chart mentioned, but similar)
http://www.acepilots.com/famhist/ssat.html
Comment by The Commissar — 07.22.04 @ 8:57 pm
Islamic slavery started in East Africa in the late 800s and was there as late 1800’s where slavery boomed. Of course, you must add the fact that Africans sold their enemies or other low caste Africans.
Africans were taken from up and down African east coast, mostly from Kenya and Tanzania. Zanzibar, which was ruled by several nations from Britain to many Islamic powers served as a slavery post. Slaves were traded for cloves and other spices.
Slavery was allowed in Zanzibar till 1873 when it was banned.
I was writing a story–a screenplay about this version of slavery with another filmmaker a few years ago. But we never finished the project.
I think it is ironic that Black Arabic/Arabics are attacking Black Africans in Sudan and Chad.
As far as family legacy, I’m not sure how far back my family goes back. I know a lot of my family is mixed with Seminoles but I don’t know when. It’s somewhere in the history of Central Florida.
Comment by Michael Trent — 07.22.04 @ 10:59 pm
I can trace my patrilineal line all the way back to one Francis Esmay, who was baptized in a Dutch Reformed church in Schanectady, New York in the late 1700s, and married a girl named Mary van der Winkle.
However, having learned all this info, it struck me after a while how meaningless it is. Francis Esmay is 10 generations removed from me. The only thing I have in common with him is his name, really. Because think about it.
You have two grandparents
Four great-grandparents
Eight great-great-grandparents
Sixteen great-great-great-grandparents… then it goes 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024.
That means there were 1,024 other people I was related to during Francis Esmay’s day, and the only one I know anything about is him.
Genetically speaking, I’m probably no more closely related to him than I am to you, LaShawn. And there were about 1,024 other people in his day who were also ancestors to me. Which means I might well have none of his genes at all. Especially if anywhere along the line there was any illegitimacy no one knew about.
The guy was from New York. I grew up in Texas and Chicago. He was Dutch Reformed. I grew up Presbyterian. He lived in the 18th century, I live in the 21st. What do I have in common with him except the letters E-S-M-A-Y?
So you know, in one sense it’s interesting, but in another it just kind of reinforces to me that the past is the past, and it’s who you are today and where your’e going that really matters.
Comment by Dean Esmay — 07.23.04 @ 12:48 am
The fun thing about geneology is that you can stick to tracing back the more interesting parts of your family and forget the rest.
As a Noonan, I trace myself back to a Thomas Francis Noonan who arrived in the United States as an illegal, illiterate Irish peasant ’round about 1850; the original “wetbacks”, as it were. He apparantly worked very hard, because his son (my great-grandfather) became a judge on the New Jersey Supreme Court. My grandfather, though, was much more interesting; or, at least, he had a more interesting life - WWI vet, football team manager, silent film actor, screenwriter, oil wildcatter; went everywhere, met everyone, did everything.
To really go back to ancient history in the family however, you have to drop the Noonan’s (though I understand that the cracker box I came out of was in Kanturk, Ireland and there’s an old church graveyard just chuck full of Noonan’s - if I ever took the time, I’d probably be able to go back to the early 18th century for the Noonan’s); much further back goes my paternal grandmother’s family - we can trace that back to mid-17th century Scotland and I’ve even got an ancestor who fought at Bunker Hill. That part of the family was the MacAlpin’s, apparantly a mid-level clan in the Scottish highlands.
On my mother’s side, its a mixture of some Swede’s, some Finn’s and one draft-dodger from the Franco-Prussian war who decided he didn’t want to die for Konieg und Vaterland.
Comment by Mark Noonan — 07.23.04 @ 2:21 am
La Shawn,
Maybe you want to get that genetic test to find out what part of Africa your ancestors came from…might prove interesting. I remember this science documentary I was watching some years back about the discovery of an ancient burial site in England…the managed to extract some usable DNA from the bones and then tested the local population and actually found a guy who was genetically related to the bones…talk about a family that didn’t move around too much!
Comment by Mark Noonan — 07.23.04 @ 2:26 am
Very good history lesson here. I enjoyed reading how we all came to America. God Bless America.
Comment by Cathy — 07.23.04 @ 8:46 am
Someone on the blogspot version of this post asked who it was in the photo that accompanies this post. It’s Levar Burton of Star-Trek: TNG fame. The TV adaptation of Roots was his first big role (the teenaged Kunte Kinte; John Amos played the adult role). Burton was nineteen at the time.
(BTW, I met Levar several years back. Wotta babe!)
Comment by Juliette — 07.23.04 @ 11:12 am
I’m a mongrel, though a WASP-y one (ancesters on the Mayflower on both sides, they tell me).
When I married my husband, one of his cousins gave me a family tree that shows where he comes from, and how our child or children will fit in. I should do the same for my side of the family.
A lot of the time, though, I’m not too curious about it. It’s the future that interests me.
But I recognize that it’s there, and that I’m lucky in that way. A friend of mine who’s Jewish had a copy of a report on his family that his mother put together. At least one page was simply entry after entry of people–cousins–who had died at Auschwitz. It was spooky to see it all in black and white that way.
Comment by Attila Girl — 07.23.04 @ 11:57 am
Juliette,
I can’t believe you just called Lavar Burton a babe. And to think, I thought you were cool…
Comment by Ambra Nykol — 07.23.04 @ 12:12 pm
Roots, Branches, Leaves
La Shawn talks about what it’s like to be Black in America, with no knowledge of where your family came from in Africa—no records, nothing. It’s an interesting question, how much this stuff matters to us. How much meaning it…
Trackback by Little Miss Attila — 07.23.04 @ 12:12 pm
I was in college when the book first came out and I can still recall sitting on my bed in the dorm room so enthralled that I skipped classes just to finish it. Because of my love for the book, I also enjoyed the miniseries. Though I was thoroughly dismayed when I learned of the plagiarism suit, the book (and movie) still hold up well as a work of fiction.
Without good records any family searching their history will soon reach an insurmountable wall or dead end, regardless of ethnicity. My family tree ends at the Civil War with a boy remembering his father returning, briefly, wounded. His mother married (she may not have been married to his father) another after the war and died shortly thereafter. His step-father, whom he loved, remarried a witch so at the age of fourteen, he took a steamship to New Orleans and lived in a Jesuit home for boys. Our family tree ends there and no doubt will remain there.
Comment by Beel — 07.23.04 @ 1:39 pm
Ambra,
I didn’t think he was so hot either until I met him. A camera doesn’t do some people justice. Levar’s one of them. It helps that he has none of that actor attitude, also (a very nice man).
Comment by Juliette — 07.23.04 @ 1:54 pm
Juliette,
Okay. Coolness amended. Agreed however, the camera is not as good to some. It’s not good to me either and therefore I will take solace in your observations about Mr. Burton.
Comment by Ambra Nykol — 07.23.04 @ 4:05 pm
Crankshaws
La Shawn Barber has moved to a new blog with a gorgeous design, here. Her last post before she moved asked about how …
Trackback by Back of the Envelope — 07.23.04 @ 8:24 pm
I’m a true mongrel. I was born and raised in Hawaii (a real melting pot). Many of the people who came there were looking for a better life. I can go back as far as my great-great grandfather on the Chinese side; great-great grandmothers on the Hawaiian side; great-grandfather on the English side; my grandfather on the Puerto-Rican side; my grandmother on the Portuguese side. I love all of the mixtures, but when it comes right down to it, I am first and foremost an American (no hyphenations for me.)
How important is it to know my roots? For me, what I know is enough - that many of these people had very hard lives, leaving their homes far away, working on plantations. They never looked back and they passed on their traditions and values to their progeny. They made the best of things and I remember most of them as loving people. I am blessed to have their blood running through my veins.
Comment by Pearl — 07.24.04 @ 3:22 am
We’ve done a lot of tracing — on my dad’s side, I’ve found that my great-grandfather is the “woodchild” grandson (or great-grandson, I forget) of General James Wilkenson, who served as early governor of the Louisiana territory; and that I’m also descended from Revolutionary War General John Stark on that side.
In addition, I’ve been working on quite a bit, and found that my father’s African family may have come from Morocco — I’m still working on that.
On my mother’s side, one cousin has been able to trace our heritage back 500 years to Chief Tuskaloosa of the Chocktaw (and who Tuscaloosa, AL is named for).
My wife’s family has been traced to a single freed slave in Macon, GA, Alexanderson Redding. I’m also working to move backward from there as well.
In any event, I’ve found background in my family from England, Scotland, France, Spain, North America and most likely Morocco. I, too, am a mutt who is proud of all of it. I’ve still got quite a bit of work to dig through though.
Comment by Michael King — 07.24.04 @ 7:45 am
Weekly Conservative Brotherhood roundup
This week, the Conservative Brotherhood has been busy (as usual), on a variety of subjects. LaShawn Barber has finally moved her always insightful blog off of BlogSplat! While that is an effort in and of itself (having made the move myself,…
Trackback by Ramblings' Journal — 07.24.04 @ 8:36 am
Some distant cousin of Mom’s did the tracing and then bound it into book form - on that side, my family goes way back to pre-colonial times, and possibly even pre-Jamestown. (There’s a bit of confusion about the primary ancestor; English records don’t show him as being on any boat (possibly he went international) and there are reports of him coming into town with a young son and native nursemaid, who might have been more than just the nursemaid.)
On my dad’s side, his parents came over from Poland in the early twentieth century. Lord alone knows if there’s any Polish records extant; last century was less than kind to Poland.
Comment by B. Durbin — 07.24.04 @ 3:51 pm
My family on both sides comes from rural Norwegian and Scottish white trash. Nobody kept any records before they got on their respective boats after the Civil War. I can’t trace anyone back more than four generations.
Comment by mitch — 07.25.04 @ 11:50 pm
Carnival of the Vanities #97
Welcome to the 97th Edition of the Carnival of the Vanities. This week’s Carnival takes us on a tour of “On This Date in History,” highlighting important historical events which have taken place on July 28th. Each person who submitted an entry chos…
Trackback by Jeff Doolittle dot com — 07.28.04 @ 12:12 pm
I’m an All-American mutt too, and it pleases me greatly. English, Irish, French, Cajun, German, Cherokee, and whatever else was around - we’ll marry anybody that suits us. Shakespeare, spirit dances, Irish jigs, Beethoven, they’re all mine and I lay claim to them.
Although to all intents and purposes we are whites, about 10 years ago my sister did some investigating into genealogy, and discovered some very likely black anscestry. I was so happy. I felt a little like a wall coming down, like “yes, we’re really brothers.” I knew I didn’t have any right or reason to consider myself black. It’s so far back it isn’t apparent, and most importantly, I’ve never had the experience of being black in America. But it still made a difference to me. Unfortunately I picked up a book called “The Sweeter The Juice” about a black woman’s search for her family that had disappeared to pass as white. By the end of the book it was evident that she had only wanted to find them so she could establish that she was the better, and there was no love involved. I finished the book, but I felt the walls go up a little bit again. That’s the way the world is. But still, I know those great African songs and art and culture are mine too.
Comment by Kathy C. — 07.28.04 @ 3:53 pm
Kathy,
That’s a great comment.
Comment by Juliette — 07.29.04 @ 1:54 am
You didn’t understand Rev. Sharpton’s comment about Clarence Thomas law degree? If the Supreme Court had not reversed the 50 year old doctrine of “separate but equal”, minorities wouldn’t have had opportunity for quality education. law school? hardly. blog less, study more LaShawn - that conservative stuff stifles critical thinking and understanding - give yourself a break - break out of it -
Comment by dianne — 07.31.04 @ 11:18 pm
Dianne, then explain how Thurgood Marshall, General Benjamin O. Davis among others attained their place in history in spite of separate, but equal? With or without it, Clarence was just as capable of getting to where he did on his own merits.
You should break free of the slavery of the mind that says you can’t make it unless Uncle Sam breaks down the barriers for you first.
If you only look around, you will find plenty of those who have done so, w/o the benefit of Affirmative Action.
By the time Brown vs Brown rolled around, my dad had just received his 2nd degree, in spite of a “double-handicap” (Black & Deaf) and was enrolling in yet another “white” university to go for his 3rd. What opened doors for him was ambition, attitude and faith in God.
The opportunity for quality education has always been there, reversing the separate-but-equal only served to make integration universal as a matter of policy.
As Dad would always say, where there’s a will, there’s a way. No one can hold you down, unless you allow them to.
Ironic then that nowadays, “equal” education is available everywhere, yet the quality has gone downhill. Perhaps quality education has something to do with the challenge rather than the ease in getting that sheepskin.
Comment by Andy — 08.01.04 @ 6:51 pm
the person who posted, their wife had traced her ancestry back to a slave by the name of Alex Redding in Macon Georgia Please contact me.He was also the ancester to my family.
Comment by charles walker — 01.18.05 @ 5:01 pm
The family reunion is perhaps the best vehicle for establishing and maintaining family heritage.
I love seeing family reunion t-shirts and looking at the names wondering if I shared a common ancestry or whether my ancestors shared the trials and tribulations of slavery with their ancestors.
Comment by Ripama — 03.04.05 @ 11:12 am