Discovering My Dramatic Roots

During the past six months I have discovered Henry Louis Gates’ show on PBS, Discovering Your Roots. The show not only introduced me to the scholar, Henry Louis Gates, but also made me interested in genealogy for which I never had much interest. On the show Gates, with his staff of back-up researchers, talks with some celebrity guests about their ancestors and their interesting experience. Gates usually finds that with African-American celebrities, their ancestors were affected by slavery and with immigrant ancestors, theirs lives were affected by the Holocaust. There are usually surprising and dramatic finds in people’s pasts.

When I had a chance for a 14-day trial on Ancestry.com, I thought I would look at my roots. I expected them to be interesting but not surprising or dramatic. And what did I find? My grandfather killed a man was tried for murder!

It took place in a small town in Eastern Kentucky. Newspaper articles at the time quoted witnesses. On June 16, 1913, my grandfather confronted a wealthy business owner whose sheep had gotten on to my grandfather’s farm and trampled and ate some corn. My grandfather (who was a tenant farmer of the sheep owner) demanded damages but the sheep owner thought the demand was too high and offered a lower fee. The story according to witnesses is that after some sharp words, my grandfather pulled out a knife and stabbed the sheep owner twice. My grandfather then fled. He was apprehended two weeks later and declared he was defending himself even though most witnesses said it looked as if he stabbed the sheep owner deliberately.

My grandfather was tried for murder in court December 5, 1913 and was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. It isn’t clear when my grandfather moved to Michigan but it must have been shortly after he was acquitted. He was also a farm laborer in Michigan and on December 2, 1917, at the age of 34, he died of a skull fracture in a farm accident. A local newspaper in Michigan said “he was a most industrious young man and well liked by all who knew him. The family moved here from Kentucky and lived in the village a few months but worked most of the time as farm tenants.”

After I had gotten over the shock of finding a dramatic and sad story about my grandfather, I decided that all I could do about it was offer him and other family members up to God’s mercy. He was a poor farmer whose future was not hopeful. If he had lived, he probably would have been a tenant farmer all his life. After his death, my grandmother moved back to Eastern Kentucky. The story of my grandfather’s stabbing and killing another man was a family secret which I had never heard. Telling the story now reminds me how blessed I have been and a large part of that blessing was my grandfather.