Cheesy Grits: Updates on the sailmaking business and the DAR application

W.H. Auden ruefully observed somewhere that "poems are never finished; only abandoned." He should have tried family history, which you can't possibly finish but can't really abandon either because of all the new information that keeps coming along.

Cheesy Grits: How Did Freedom Come to the Thornes?

The story of freedom for the Thornes seems to start in New York City—at least, that's as far back as I've traced it to date. (I'm still working on it, of course; family history never really ends.) Around 1785, a white New Yorker named John Gardner Thorne moved from New York to Charleston. I don't yet know if he fought in the Revolutionary War, although he would have been of age to fight. All we know is that his epitaph notes that he lived in Charleston for "...about thirty five years." Since he died in 1820, my arithmetic says he arrived around 1785.

Cheesy Grits: Charleston's Free Persons of Color

Who were Charleston's "Free Persons of Color"? A simple description works well here: "Free Persons of Color" were those persons who had African ancestry but who were not slaves; they were free.

Free Persons of Color were found wherever there were slaves throughout the "New World." According to the U.S. census, in 1860, there were very nearly 4 million slaves in the U.S. and nearly 500,000 Free Persons of Color. A surprising number of them lived in the South in the very heart of chattel slavery. In 1861, Charleston's population totaled 48,409: 26,969 white, 17,655 slaves, and 3,785 "free colored."

Cheesy Grits: The Thornes of Charleston before the Civil War

Having found Rebecca Thorne's parents, Philip and Elizabeth Thorne, and several siblings in the federal censuses for 1880 and 1870, it was time to see if we could break through the wall of the Civil War and find them in the 1860 federal census for South Carolina before that state seceded from the Union in December, 1860.

Cheesy Grits: The Thornes of Charleston in 1880 and 1870

Once we knew that Jane's great-grandmother's parents were Robert Howard and Rebecca (Thorne) Howard, it was a piece of relative cake to look them up in the 1880 census. And here's what we found:

Cheesy Grits: The Holy City

So we're back on the trail of Jane's ancestry again. Our major focus thus far has been her great-grandmother, Valeria Thorne Howard Ralston Wilcoxson. Although the federal census sheets had told us she was born in the state of South Carolina, it wasn't until we got a copy of her death certificate that we discovered that she had been born in the city of Charleston, and that her parents were Robert Howard and Rebecca Thorne.

Excursus: Maryland, My Maryland: Frostburg: an apartheid of memory.

As I mentioned in the previous post, my search for Garrett County's "missing persons" led me to Prof. Lynn Bowman's work recovering the history of African-Americans in Frostburg (MD), which is in Allegany County, the next county east from Garrett County.

Like Garrett County, Allegany County has long been overwhelmingly European—yet with an enduring African-American presence that had been almost completely forgotten. What Prof. Bowman has documented is the depth of the roots of that presence in Frostburg, as well as the hornswoggling that simply pushed nearly all of them out, removing them from the landscape and, ineluctably, from modern memory.