Precious Memories

Back in mid 2005, around the time I started the Descendants of Mandi website, my grandmother Elnora Evans and her husband Mr. Cleave Evans were living in the downstairs apartment of the house I own. My two daughters Chelsea and Lindsay are among those rare people who got the chance to live with their great-grandparents.

My youngest daughter Lindsay, who was two at the time, was a frequent visitor downstairs, and I can honestly say that my grandmother really enjoyed having Lindsay (one of her three great-grand daughters) so close that she could see her almost every day.

Lindsay would often disappear downstairs for hours at a time, sometimes falling asleep in grandmas bed, other times hijacking one of their TVs to watch Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel. Another trick was to go downstairs and have another breakfast, lunch or dinner with grandma and grandpa after eating a complete meal upstairs with us.

On this particular day, we had just finished breakfast and Lindsay was waiting to get her hair combed (which she hates by the way). All of a sudden, she ran to the door and disappeared downstairs, calling up “I’m going down to see Grandma and Cleave!”

I’m not sure what made me do it, but something made me grab the camera and follow her down. It didn’t take me long to figure out why she had decided to come down… the smell of pancakes and bacon was wonderful, and Lindsay had decided that it was a good day for a second breakfast. I turned the camera on just as Lindsay was settling onto the little red stepping stool that all of us in the family call “Grandma’s kid chair.”

What followed were three magical minutes of Lindsay, who could barely talk, eating and chatting with her great-grandparents, with the two of them understanding every word that she said…

I took the video and then filed it away, giving digital copies of it to a few members of the family, but otherwise not really giving it a second thought.

My grandmother, Elnora Evans passed away about two years later, in 2007 at 92 years of age. Her husband Cleave Evans, passed away this past summer (August 2009). When Grandpa Evans passed, I remembered the video of them with Lindsay and became obsessed with finding it. The problem is that four years and three hard drive crashes later, I had no idea if it even existed any more. I also had forgotten what the exact name of the file was and I had no idea where I had stored it. I searched for it last summer to no avail. I got busy in the fall and decided to postpone my search until Christmastime when I’d have the time to do a thorough search.

When Christmas came, I re-started my search by loading and viewing all the burned CDs of miscellaneous pictures, digital images and saved files that we’d stored away in the past few years. Nothing. I searched the hard drives of my father’s and my mother-in-law’s computers because I’d given them digital copies. Nothing. I looked on my own external hard drives…NOTHING!

I did, however, find a clue on my dad’s computer, a shortcut icon that contained the actual name of the file: MVI_1960.AVI –which was the object of my quest. My dad had saved a shortcut, but the original file had long since been deleted so the shortcut now pointed at nothing. I took that bit of information and did a more thorough search of the thousands of files stored on my external HD… eventually VOILA! It popped up. It brought a tear to my eye when I finally got to view the scene of Lindsay’s breakfast with grandma and grandpa again.

To protect it for posterity, I uploaded a copy to YouTube, and made additional copies on my other computers as well as my online digital storage space mobileme.com.

Here’s my advice. Digital files are very vulnerable to disk failures, hard drive crashes and all manner of technical calamity, not to mention fire or other natural disaster. Be sure to provide multiple backups for ALL of your digital pictures and videos; fires, floods and earthquakes DO happen when you least expect them, not to mention the dreaded hard drive or system failures that we all experience every once in a while.

I got lucky… and I learned my lesson. The result of my luck is that Lindsay will one day be able to look back as an adult, and see the video images of herself smiling and laughing with her great grandparents in video taken by chance on a Saturday morning in 2005 when she was 2 & ½ years old.

That’s A PRECIOUS MEMORY.

My daughter Chelsea's Family Report

Part of the fun of this genealogy stuff is getting to share it with your kids. My wife Kelly and I were thrilled last week when our daughter, Chelsea, was assigned the task of interviewing us for a report on her family and culture. When the dust cleared, Chelsea had produced a 2-page report that was packed with all kinds of information...probably more than her teacher had bargained for... and we were just getting started!

With Chelsea's permission, I'm reproducing it here because quite a bit of it repeats the History of Grandma Mandi...Oral History....PRICELESS!

Cross your fingers that she gets an A+
_____________________________________________________

11-15-06

Chelsea Williams

Rm 202, Ms Conley Dunbar

My Family History and Culture

1. Does your name have any special meaning?

My name was given to me while my parents were in San Francisco, CA in Oct. of 1996, the weekend they learned they were expecting me. My Mom and Dad spent an afternoon at a bookstore near Embarcadero Center researching names and decided to name me Chelsea because one of my Dad's favorite songs is "I don't want to go to Chelsea" By Elvis Costello. and Chelsea is also one my Mom's favorite neighborhoods in New York --because of the art and culture in the area. Chelsea in New York was named after the same area in London that the Costello song was written about. CHELSEA's meaning in Old English is a Port of Ships or a "landing place for ships [on the river] marked with chalk or limestone"

I have two middle names. I was given McCOY because it is my mother's maiden name and my Mom said she thinks it is important to pass along family names because when people ask you about your name it is an opportunity to tell your family story.

My father added Alexandra because he liked the meaning. ALEXANDRA is a feminine form of ALEXANDER (it is from Greek) and means "Defender or Protector of Men"

2. Where are your ancestors from?

My ancestors come from West Africa primarily, and I have ancestors from other places too, including Native Americans (Cherokee, Shawnee and Choctaw) and a few of my ancestors were European (including French, English, Scottish and Irish), also one of my great-great grandmothers was from New Giunea.

3. Did your family migrate to Chicago Illinois from another state?

My family arrived in Illinois by way of four different paths. My mother moved to Chicago when she finished college in 1988 to work for an advertising agency. She met my father here in Chicago. She was born in Ohio and her family has lived there since 1817. Her mother's family is from the south and moved north during the Great Migration in 1919.

My father was born in Chicago but his father was born in western Tennessee . The Williams' moved north in the 1950's from Brownsville, Tennessee. My father's mother's family are also Williams' and they migrated to Chicago by way of New Orleans and Houston, Texas. They have been here for over 100 years.

4. Name something that is a significant part of your culture.

Oral history is a significant part of our culture. Oral history is described as an account of something passed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. People of African descent have always been story tellers and in West Africa the Griot is the repository or keeper of the oral tradition.

Much of what we know today about my mother's family (the Tyler family) is a combination of written, documented history and oral history that was passed from generation to generation. An example of this is the story of my great-great-great-great-grandmother Ann Fowler. The story was passed down that she was brought to Ohio from a small town in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in New York at the age of 5 by a family named the Kelley's in 1817. She grew up, married a man by the name of William McAfee and they had 5 children, one of whom was my great-great-great grandmother Maria McAfee Tyler.

We also know that Ann's mother was captured in West Africa, sold into slavery in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil) and then sold again and taken to North America to the slave markets of Rhode Island. She was bought by a family that lived in Connecticut and it was there that she had a child whom they named Ann.

When my mother was a girl not much older than me, she remembered her great uncle telling the story of Ann Fowler. When my mother grew up she used technology to help her authenticate the story of Ann Fowler. She was able to learn of other family members who descend from Ann fowler and used the internet to research my family's history. My mother was able to make a connection with living descendants of the Kelley family who owned my great-great-great-great grandmother and there was a book written about the Kelley family and they mention Ann in the book. It confirms her age, the year she was born and the circumstances under which they became her owners.

Because Ohio was a free-state, once she came to Ohio she was no longer a slave and her children were born free. We are lucky to have a picture of Ann Fowler and I have brought a copy of it to class.

The Tyler family has been written about in Newspapers and recognized in other ways. "The Tylers... have the longest lineage of any black families with roots still in place in Columbus, Ohio," wrote Bob Thomas, in the Columbus Dispatch, on April 3, 1994. A historical marker was dedicated to the Tyler Family Legacy in 2005 and also in 2005 the Ohio Historical Society developed an exhibit based on the history of the Tyler family. It is the featured topic of Ohio's 2007 National History Day Project "Triumph and Tragedy in History. This part of my family History can be found at the website http://www.tylerfamilylegacy.com.

My father's family traces its origins to several family's of former slaves in Haywood County near Brownsville Tennessee. I went to Tennessee with my grandfather just two weeks ago. This part of my family also has a lot of oral history which has been confirmed by historical records.

My great-great-great-great Grandmother from my dad's family was a woman named Mandi Williams. We know that she was born free in Africa some time around 1805. We know that she was the product of a large African family of 13 brothers and sisters, but we do not know where she fell in this family, the exact composition of the family, the surname of this family or in what exact area of Western Africa they lived. We do, however, know that they (and she) were of the Mende Tribe, and that her tribe's name was the source of her own first name. The year of her abduction, transport and sale into slavery was 1821 after the end of the legal slave trade. She was 16 years old.

We have been able to locate her name in the slave records of the Rayners, of Charleston, South Carolina as well as those of the Williams and Thum families in Tennessee. She was listed along with the cattle and livestock of their farms. She told her daughter, Harriet Rayner, and grandson, Dennis Williams, that upon her arrival in America, she was sold in the slave markets of Charleston, South Carolina for $250.00. After the Civil War, Mandi moved to Western Tennessee and took the name Williams after family of one of her former owners. She lived there for 36 years. At the time of the Emancipation, in 1863, Mandi was 58 years old. Mandi Williams died in 1899, in Haywood County near Brownsville Tennessee. She was 94 years old. No known pictures of her survive. This part of my family history can be found at the websites http://www.descendantsofmandi.com and http://www.shortaustinfamilytree.com.

I am thankful that my family continues to pass down our oral history because I know where my family comes from and I am proud of my ancestors and what they endured.