This African American Genealogical Website traces the beginnings of the Williams-Rivers Family of Haywood County / Brownsville, Tennessee. The American chapter of our story began in 1821 with the abduction of a 16-year-old girl named Mandi in West Africa. This girl, born free in 1805 was a member of the West African Mende tribe. Today her descendants number more than a thousand individuals.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
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.
MANDI WILLIAMS She was born free in Africa some time around 1805, near what is now Ghana, and abducted into slavery at 16 years old, in 1821. She was a member of the West African Mende tribe. In 1827, at 22 years of age, she gave birth to a half-white baby, a child she named Harriett. At the time of the Emancipation, in 1863, She was 58 years old. She moved to Haywood County, Tenessee, to a section called the "Watkins Quarter." Her family put down roots there, eventually becoming successful farmers and landowners. She would live there for the next 36 years. She died in 1899, in Haywood County near Brownsville Tennessee. She was 94 years old. No known pictures of her survive.
But we survive. We are her children.
