here in Seattle.
By Lornet Turnbull
Special To The Medium
Two decades ago as her mother grew ill, Martha Collins began to ponder her own legacy.
She worried she was losing the people who could help connect her to a broader family circle. And she wanted to make sure her grandchildren and great grandchildren knew who their relatives were.
Collins’ 25-year crusade to examine her lineage and build a family mosaic, led to discovery of relatives she couldn’t have imagined in far-flung parts of the world.
Researching her mother’s maternal bloodline took her six generations back to 1870, where on a U.S. Census form from that year she found her great-great-great-grandmother, a mixed-race woman named Violet Yeates, living with her husband and their four children on a plantation in rural Mississippi.
Violet would become Collin’s obsession, and the energy behind her three-year battle to have the neglected and abandoned cemetery in Starkville, Miss where Violet is buried designated an historic site.
“This is something I needed to do,” said Collins, a Central Area resident.
“Violet has helped me make connections and given me family that I couldn’t have gotten on my own,” added Collins. “It’s been quite a remarkable discovery.”
Connecting to the past
Technology has put an arsenal of research tools at the fingertips of family historians like Collins, who increasingly are using DNA and a range of public and private records to build bridges to their past.
Genealogy has motivated an emerging field of course work on college campuses and a proliferation of new television shows. And it has spawned affinity groups across the country, including the Black Genealogy Research Group in Seattle, of which Collins is a member.
The group meets every first Saturday at the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM). NAAM also has a genealogy center staffed by volunteers, like Collins.
“The technology, all the stuff that is now available on record, has opened a floodgate in America,” Collins said. “What took me 25 years to accomplish, with the technology, would probably have taken 5 years.”
Collins has traveled throughout the country, across the South and up and down the East Coast, visiting relatives she’s found in the course of her research, most of them women she calls her DNA sisters.
In fact, through DNA matches, she has made connections with a Jewish cousin in Australia, another woman in the Dominican Republic – people from different racial and religious backgrounds.
“I found a lady whose family was Quaker,” she said. “You become a more educated person when you know your background.”
Most of the relatives she’s located and the connections she’s made were possible in large part because more people are submitting to genetic testing – whether for medical reasons or to connect with family – and then making those results public.
Still, Collins said, not enough African Americans are doing it.
“A lot of black people don’t know anything about their past, about where they came from,” she said. “You know, it’s a bad thing when you marry your cousin.”
Honoring the past
Despite all the information at her disposal, Collins has been unable to get beyond Violet, her great-great-great grandmother from Mississippi.
Widowed in the late 1800s, Violet first appears with her family in the census’ 1870 population count, the first after the 1865 abolition of slavery. And she shows up in every subsequent census through 1930, when she lived with a granddaughter and great-grandchildren in Mississippi — a year before she died.
In the spaces on her 1931 death certificate that asks for the names of her parents, someone wrote “do not know.”
Discovering who Violet’s parents were is complicated by the fact that she is believed to have been mulatto, often the offspring of a slave and slave master. What’s more, the census did not name slaves — if that’s what she was; rather their existence was noted by age and gender on a slave owner’s plantation.
When she died in 1931, at age 86, Violet was buried in a colored cemetery in Starkville, Miss, alongside many of her relatives.
In some cases, three generations have been laid to rest there, many of them important figures during slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction. They were homeowners and business owners, Collins discovered in her research. “They were very independent,” she said.
But on a 2012 visit to Starkville to see where they have lived – and died – the Seattle woman was appalled by the cemetery’s neglected appearance. Most of the gravesites are unmarked and many of the headstones had been damaged or destroyed.
The scene was very different at the white cemetery across the street.
Collins still remembers that first visit, driving down the street and gazing at a cemetery on her right and thinking, “how gorgeous,” she said.
And then she glanced across the street and up the hill a ways “and I saw something that looked like a dumping ground. I snapped a picture from inside the car. I wasn’t going up there.”
Ironically, many of the people in both cemeteries were related.
Collins couldn’t get the image out of her head. Back in Seattle, she embarked on a project to have the abandoned cemetery named to the National Register of Historic Places so it could be preserved.
It wasn’t as simple as filing out a form and making a request.
She had to identify those buried in the cemetery, a process complicated by the fact that there were few markers left on the gravesites. Also, newspapers back then didn’t write obituaries about slaves and colored people.
She relied on conversations with town folks, used death and marriage certificates, wills, deeds, church, school and military records. There were black and mulatto soldiers from WWI and the Civil War buried in the cemetery, Collins said.
“To put it into context, you have to tie it in with history,” she said of genealogy in general. “If you don’t study history, it won’t make sense.”
To help with context, Collins also began pursuing a certification in genealogy from the University of Washington, which she earned in 2012. She now also serves on the program’s advisory board.
It took her three years, many trips to Starkville and a lot of bureaucratic red tape and road blocks before the designation was finally made in 2014. The findings of her research are cited in her book, Tracing Violet, which was published last year.
“I am giving a legacy to the people in that cemetery,” she said. “I wanted to put them in the light.”
While Collins has become fascinated with Violet, that’s not the only family line she’s researched.
She traced her mother’s paternal lineage to the arrival of their ancestors from England in 1634.
And on her father’s side, she found that her paternal grandfather was born into slavery in Louisiana. After slavery was abolished, he remained as a sharecropper on the plantation, where his children, including Collins’ father, were born.
