CHAPTER ONE

ORDINARY PEOPLE, AMAZING DISCOVERIES:

when DNA and ancestry stories change your life

Thanks to a national scout jamboree in Virginia and a volunteer project helping teens discover more about themselves through an ancestry search project, Edgie Donakey says he “fell in love with what technology can do to help families discover their stories.”

“Seeing these young people on their computers, finding out who they are by learning more about the relatives that came before them, opened my eyes to how powerful these discoveries really are,” says Donakey.

He’s also personally experienced the poignant moments when an ancestry connection is suddenly made.

One of those moments happened when he was in downstate Illinois, where he had traced some of the Donakey family to a farm they ran. When he was visiting a small historical society there, he met “two little old ladies who were the sweetest things,” says Donakey. The Donakeys had long since left the area and moved to the Northwest, but the women remembered the mark the family made in the town.

“They were so excited to find out I was a member of the Donakey family,” he says. “And I was like a seven-year-old on Christmas morning—it was that thrilling for me.”

Donakey’s experience speaks volumes about the magic that happens when people suddenly stumble on an ancestry discovery and make a connection that previously eluded them. Since that Eagle Scout camp sixteen years ago, he’s been committed to helping people across the globe discover the stories of their ancestors.

As the vice president of strategic relations and deputy chief genealogy officer of FamilySearch International, Donakey monitors the worldwide landscape of genealogy, looking for the newest and best tools to put into the hands of future generations of ancestry seekers.

“What makes everyone so fascinated by searching their ancestry is that all of us have powerful stories of those who came before us and alongside us that we want to hand down to our children and our children’s children,” says Donakey, who made that midcareer switch sixteen years ago to FamilySearch after his fateful Eagle Scout volunteer weekend. Prior to that, he had carved out a highly successful career in the fast-paced corporate world of mergers and acquisitions, designing and implementing strategies for Fortune 500 companies. “Whether you’re a multimillionaire or on a fixed income, you can do all the searching you want on the ancestry sites. And those searches can result in some very exciting moments.”

During his business travels around the world, he says he’s always thrilled when he’s at the airport and spots travelers on their laptops searching the ancestry sites.

“Everywhere I go, these conversations are striking up,” he says.

Through his work, he and his colleagues have helped people find many surprises. Of course, sometimes digging into the family tree unearths pieces of a bigger story than the one you envisioned. As can digging through old suitcases and memorabilia buried in the back of closets and other places where ancestors hid their secrets.

Often, the answers aren’t what we wanted to hear. If your experience is anything like some, you may find a dramatic “switched at birth” situation, a sibling you never knew about, or other results that are confounding.

Buyer beware. Even the commercial genetic tests spell out the possibility of such a bombshell.

And what happens when you aren’t even exploring your own ancestry, but out of the blue the phone rings and it’s a long-lost, never-known relative who has tracked you down?

More often than expected, the findings can force you to reimagine your identity. For some the confusion leads to outright shock. For others, it confirms an inner knowing that something was just not right.

What we’ve come to learn in sharing the stories in this book is that knowing the truth, even if it feels harsh or hard to accept at first, can be healing. In some cases, it can give us a sense of empathy when we realize we are all human and sometimes we find ourselves making decisions that have a ripple effect for generations to come.

The stories of people in this chapter underscore the importance of sharing our stories as an act of growth, healing, and ultimately selflessness. When we find these authentic stories—sad, funny, hopeful, or tragic—we can begin to narrate our own.

“There are infinite stories in the records out there and infinite numbers of people seeking them,” says Donakey. “It’s important for all of us to find them.”

An Ancestry Adventure: When DNA testing unearths the family secret

While trying out two of the most popular DNA testing services—Ancestry.com and 23andMe.com—all Carole Hines wanted to know was why her brother was so tall, so blond, and so strikingly opposite looking compared to her own five-foot-three, black-haired self.

The questions started at a young age, when she intuitively knew that “something made me really different from my brother and sister.”

That simple knowing would take Hines, sixty-nine, who lives with her wife, Mavis, in both San Francisco and New York City, on a long journey of race and ethnicity.

It all started several years ago when her brother died suddenly in his sleep of a massive heart attack. He had recently tested his DNA, and his results showed he was 99 percent of European descent.

More than forty years before, when Hines first introduced her brother to Mavis for the first time, she remembers Mavis’s shock. When the tall, blue-eyed, “very Viking-looking” man walked in the door, Mavis looked at her, and she could just feel her thinking, “What, this is your brother, really?”

Fast-forward to 2017, when Hines took her DNA test. She couldn’t believe the results, so she took a second one with another company and discovered she was mostly Latino, with traces of Native American, Ashkenazi Jewish, and Basque.

Ironically, coincidentally, or call it providentially, Hines, who is a frequent globetrotter, says every time she’s in Spain (her favorite country) people approach her speaking Castilian Spanish and asking for directions.

“It’s funny, but I’ve always loved the food. If I could, I would live on cheese enchiladas,” says Hines.

Unlike many people who discover that their DNA is startlingly different from their family members’, Hines said she didn’t find the news troubling or opening any wounds. Instead it was more like she could better understand the reason for the scars she had carried with her for more than sixty years.

“I always felt like I was such an oddball, but now I know the truth,” says Hines.

The truth, it turns out, is that her biological father, Joe, who was from Mexico, was quite the Casanova. During the 1950s, her mother, Joyce, worked in Los Angeles for the Teamsters. Hines learned through conversations with one of her half brothers that her biological father was a union organizer and spent a lot of time traveling to Los Angeles—and he “had a hobby of dating married women.”

“My father and mother had their own issues, and he was probably not around, so along comes this man who jangles his money around, wines and dines her, and probably says, ‘Oh honey, I’m going to get a divorce.’ And then he vanishes.”

Evidently that happened at least nine times to different women, as Hines has uncovered eight half brothers. “I’m the only female I know of.”

Since she’s connected with her biological father’s heirs, she says most of them have embraced her and are now her Facebook friends. Many live in Southern California, and she has formed relationships with some of them and some nieces and nephews.

The oldest in her family, Hines is four years apart from her brother. Her brother and her sister are the biological children of the man she thought was her father and called “Daddy” her whole life. He had black hair and brown eyes, and she says she thought she looked like him, or wanted to believe she did. His family traces back to the Mayflower, and her mother, with her auburn hair and light skin, “was very Irish.” Both of her parents are deceased.

The finding was freeing, says Hines.

Throughout her life, Hines says she remembers marching to a different drummer than her siblings and family members. Her intellectual bent and passion to crusade for people who can’t speak up for themselves were mainstays.

“I couldn’t tolerate prejudice,” says Hines, who grew up in Southern California but in high school moved to Memphis, Tennessee, to live with her father, who had relocated there after her parents’ divorce. “I am the biggest coward in the world, but one day when I was in class and someone said a very derogatory word against a classmate, I remember jumping out of my chair and saying, ‘Don’t call people that.’”

She also remembers a “not-so-happy” childhood after her parents divorced when she was eight.

“I worked hard at school and read a lot, but I always felt very anxious and vulnerable,” she says. “I didn’t know who I was. My job was to take care of the younger kids, so I just lost myself in books and school.”

Today, she and Mavis are committed pacifists who, she says, “have participated in more peace marches than I can count.”

Recently she posted a childhood photo of herself and her friends at a birthday on her Facebook page, which speaks to the strong connection she has made to her newly discovered Latino heritage and the relatives—eight half brothers and their families—she’s discovered from the DNA matches.

“The picture is of me at my birthday, and there I am, this little Mexican girl with a full head of raven-black hair surrounded by a sea of white kids,” she says. A husband of one of her biological family members saw the photo and asked his wife, “Is that you?” Hines said.

LEGACY LESSON

“I’ve never understood racism or prejudice and anything that diminishes people because of their race or ethnicity or how they live. Now I better understand what I instinctively knew in my pores, that I was of a different color, that I was a little bit different. Maybe I feel so strongly because I was fighting unconsciously for myself.”

Caught by Surprise: A relative’s DNA search reveals secret family members

Bridget (Wingert) FitzPatrick paid fleeting attention to all the “Bring Your Stories to Life” Ancestry.com commercials and 23andMe.com’s “Health Happens Now” jingle when they’d flash across her TV screen.

“Someday I’ll get to that,” thought FitzPatrick, fifty-seven, a Lewes, Delaware, freelance writer and mother of four.

“I’d kind of dipped my toes in exploring around, and I did the Ancestry.com DNA test, but that was in the early days, before it exploded and everyone was testing their DNA. I didn’t really find much and kind of forgot about it.”

The term NPE (not parent expected), describing people who discovered for themselves that their father isn’t their biological father, was a foreign term to her. Why would she know about that? She and her three siblings were raised in a no-drama suburban Pennsylvania household by their loving mom and dad.

But sometimes it is other people who make the NPE discovery and who must then decide if, when, and how to share that news.

That’s what happened when FitzPatrick received an email from Jeff, who had recently discovered he had a half brother he never knew about. Call it an NBE (not the brother expected) situation. His father, it turns out, had a couple of previous families and three children that he’d fathered, but he had not been involved in their lives and hadn’t told anyone about his previous families.

The brother was Joseph (Joe) Thomas Wingert, Bridget FitzPatrick’s father.

“I was ‘found’ by an uncle I did not know even existed, who found my siblings and me through a popular ancestry database,” says FitzPatrick. “So, although I was not the person actively seeking to mend any holes in my family’s quilted history, I watched with joy as his questions were answered and other mysteries began to unravel.”

The roots of the mystery reach back to her father’s childhood in the 1930s, when his father, Jacob Wingert, suddenly disappeared from his life—and the lives of his mother and sister—just days after he was born.

“For the remainder of his life, Dad never pursued his own father’s whereabouts,” says FitzPatrick. “Perhaps it wasn’t worth the heartache, or maybe he never felt the

need.”

There was no legal divorce or separation, just a vanishing act. In his absence, FitzPatrick’s father was raised by his mother, maternal grandmother, and maternal uncles. The name Wingert was not quite abandoned, but he grew up nicknamed Joe Carney, his mother’s maiden name and the surname of his Irish Catholic grandma and uncles.

Little thought was given to the German or Hungarian Wingert heritage. No one really knew, and it didn’t matter.

Fast-forward to 2015. That’s when the call came from Jeff, the half brother he never knew about.

“My father was terminally ill with only weeks to live by the time he was serendipitously ‘found’ by his half brother,” says FitzPatrick. “Dad surprised us all by expressing a willingness to meet him.”

He said, “Sure, let’s have a party.”

The timing was imperative, as her father was being moved from the hospital into hospice.

With about twenty relatives gathered at her parents’ Philadelphia home, FitzPatrick and her husband, Ward, went to the airport to pick up her new uncle from Omaha, Nebraska.

“When I first looked at him, the resemblance was uncanny,” she remembers. “It was like looking at my oldest brother.”

An only child, Jeff had been raised in Iowa and was only ten when his father (FitzPatrick’s long-gone grandfather) died from lung cancer. Through Jeff’s research, he discovered that the elder Wingert had a first family, where he’d fathered Joe and his sister, and a second family. Then he had divorced, remarried, and had Jeff ten years into that marriage. Jeff is only three years older than FitzPatrick.

“If you could have seen the look on my father’s face when Jeff came through the door,” says FitzPatrick. “He was glowing. I can’t speak for him, but I think he was very pleased to meet his legacy, his half brother. Jeff is a successful, nice guy, and they really hit it off. It was a very, very happy day.”

Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of their meeting was Jeff’s ability to demystify the image of their grandfather, whom they’d previously seen as a bad guy who just one day took off and left the family.

FitzPatrick says that Jeff told nice stories about his father, and that it sounded like he had a very happy, idyllic childhood. Joe Wingert never knew he had other siblings, other than his sister Lenore, also raised by the Carneys. It turns out that their father, Jacob Wingert, was also an interesting and successful man. Their father, Jeff explained, was a mechanical genius who fixed factory equipment and even trained pilots during World War II.

“I really believe this brought some closure for my father,” FitzPatrick says. “To think he was terminally ill, and a half brother walked in, it’s like divine intervention or something. They liked each other right away and even had some of the same mannerisms.”

Her father died three weeks after the visit.

“If we had put Jeff off, or waited, they never would have met,” she says.

“Jeff’s search was prompted only by his own children’s questions about his ancestry,” she says. “He was flabbergasted to discover he had a half brother and sister! All of this was discovered after being told this for almost sixty years that he was an only child.”

Like many of the out-of-the-blue sibling DNA discoveries, this one is chock full of coincidences. FitzPatrick’s middle son, Matt, was attending law school at Creighton University in Omaha, just blocks from Jeff’s office. When Matt graduated, just weeks after they first learned about Jeff, members from both families got together to celebrate and learn more about each other.

“We’re staying in touch and connecting at holidays,” says FitzPatrick. “Ours is a very happy family in the fact that my father and all of us welcomed the news. Well, at least eventually. At first, my mother was a bit protective of my father, especially given his health at the time. But [Jeff] turned out to be an interesting and kind guy and a wonderful new addition to our family.”

Meantime, the reunion has sparked FitzPatrick’s interest in ancestry research.

One mystery that has been resolved: the Wingert family is not Hungarian, as was assumed. In fact, the descendants are predominantly Irish, Scottish, and English, with heritage from a smaller fraction of multiple northwestern European countries.

She says, “My father was able to heal an open wound before he passed away, and my uncle has become a close friend, especially with me. He got the bug that ancestry-seekers often relate, filling in the gaps of knowledge and lore. And although I found it hard to miss the grandfather I never knew but always wondered about (since his name branded my identity until I married), finding my uncle has revealed many wondrous stories about his adventures and service to our country.”

Today, she’s discovering what she calls “more leaves on that side of my family tree.” They continue to be filled in, as do other branches from her mother’s side—a family that has also dealt with painful separation through emigration and unknown destinations. “In my case,” she says, “I have experienced both a sense of closure and a profound respect for my ancestors’ journeys to the United States.”

LEGACY LESSON

“Hearing the nice stories about my grandfather has prompted all of us to not make assumptions and to give more thought to why he left. Maybe the Carneys, my maternal grandmother’s brothers and family, kicked him out. We’ll never know. But my father was able to connect with a part of his family that brought him joy.”

Upending the Family Tree: DNA reveals life-changing answer to “Who am I?”

In her novel Tree of Lives, award-winning author Elizabeth Garden explores, among other things, fate and how we carry ghosts from the past with us into the future.

The story follows Ruth, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Connecticut artist with a rich pedigree. Ruth finds herself drawn to Jewish people in her community, the only people she came across who treated her with kindness, besides one grandmother with whom she was very close.

During her tumultuous life, Ruth briefly befriends a famous man who advises her to “marry a Jew.” Later, she finally meets a very nice Jewish doctor and even converts.

Then she takes a DNA test and discovers she is 14 percent Jewish. It turns out, her beloved grandmother was Jewish but was adopted and raised by another family.

The book has gained widespread attention. Tree of Lives won a gold medal in women’s literature from the Florida Authors and Publishers Association President’s Book Awards.

But the plot thickens when readers discover the work is autobiographical and describes Garden’s own journey as she uncovered a life-changing secret in her own family.

Growing up in southwestern Connecticut, Garden, sixty-five, never quite felt comfortable with all the emphasis on her family’s ties to the Daughters of the American Revolution and all the hoity-toity machinations required of families of affluence.

In the 1960s, her town was one of the nation’s most patrician and palatial communities, and far from an ethnic hodgepodge. The town was home to restrictive country clubs, places where, by many accounts, Jews were not always made to feel welcome, and Garden never quite accepted that she was solely a descendant of the Puritan settlers who ran the show. Instead, she was always drawn to her Jewish friends.

Then, a family secret emerged—her father had committed a murder after escaping from a mental institution. It burst the bubble that surrounded the family’s serene WASPY perfection.

It had always been clear that Garden was marching to a different beat, a trait that took her to a different place emotionally than the rest of her family and allowed her the freedom to follow her instincts.

“My house was so oppressive, but when I was with my Jewish friends, I came alive, I belonged,” she says. At one point during her career as an art director, she crossed paths with the American director, writer, actor, comedian, producer, and composer Mel Brooks, and the duo clicked. Meeting over drinks, Brooks told her, “You need a Jew.”

Shortly afterward she met her husband—her Jewish husband.

The sense that she was closely connected to a Jewish heritage lingered, and she decided to take a DNA test. She’d heard her lineage could be traced back to biblical days, so maybe she could even find a Jewish thread way back.

“The result was a lot more than a thread—it was a whole new warp and weft in the family tapestry,” says Garden. She discovered she was 14 percent Jewish.

She learned that her beloved grandmother was Jewish by birth but had been adopted and raised by another family.

All along, Garden wanted a sense of belonging to a group that she wasn’t part of but knew she was somehow connected to. The discovery brought her a sense of rootedness within a culture she’d always been drawn to without understanding why.

“I think inside all of us is a quest to look closely at what is right beneath the surface, to see who we are,” says Garden. “And I think that if we listen closely enough, there are ghosts from our past—in my case my great-uncle, who was calling out because he wanted to be understood. Our ancestors need us to connect some dots, and only those of us who listen to their voices can do that. Otherwise we would be repeating their mistakes.”

LEGACY LESSON

Garden expresses the lessons she learned through her lead character Ruth in her book Tree of Lives. While Ruth successfully identified the Jewish connection she felt, she also learned more about the well-documented historic ancestors who preceded her.

“Ruth’s legacy lesson becomes hardwired by the conclusion of her unusual life story, a future legacy written in the DNA of her grandchildren,” says Garden. “Ruth saw her part in the making of this new type of world person as mission accomplished, her bit toward creating a world free of prejudice.”

Ancient Wisdom: A long-ago ancestor’s journal changes the course of her life

Who am I? Where do I come from? And where am I going? Those were the questions the always-inquisitive Caroline Guntur (then Caroline Nilsson) peppered her parents with from an early age on.

Born in Sweden, Guntur was an only child. She lost her maternal grandparents during her childhood. Her paternal grandparents weren’t in her life, either.

“We had a seemingly very small family,” she says.

Her mom’s response to her constant barrage of queries to learn more about the family story was often answered with: “I don’t know that much. My parents didn’t really talk about these things. We were not the kind of family that was into all that feeling chatter. We are forward focused, not backward. What’s past was history. No need to revisit it.”

Years of persistence paid off when Guntur’s high school teacher called on students to create a family tree and write about their family history.

“I was overjoyed,” says Guntur. “My teacher thought it would help us to relate to history in a deeper way.”

For the teenager, it was all the ammunition she needed to start cracking her family story open.

***

Shrugging in resignation, Guntur’s mother started pulling out memorabilia she’d kept from her own father’s stash of memories in the family’s living room cabinet.

A worn ticket stub for a steamship passage to America became the major clue to the elusive mystery.

“I got very confused, because as far as I knew, my whole family was Swedish, so why would they have a ticket like that?” she remembers asking.

Guntur would discover that her great-grandparents, Per and Anna Lasson, had emigrated to Duluth, Minnesota, in the late 1800s. Per had helped build the railroad in Duluth, and they stayed there for almost ten years before returning home to Sweden, where Guntur’s grandfather (her mother’s father) was born.

“This blew my mind, because I had never heard this story before, and it ignited my passion for family history,” she says. “I started researching and never looked back.”

As she kept researching, she found a journal from a man named Michael Tengwall, her six-times great-grandfather. In it, he wrote about his experiences in 1738 being shipwrecked off the coast of Cadiz, an ancient port city in Spain. The entire ship capsized, and Tengwall was one of the few survivors. (See following excerpt from Guntur’s essay “Setting Sail: How One Man’s Story Changed My Life.”)

That journal completely changed her life.

“I found story after story about this amazing adventurer, my relative, and it changed my whole attitude toward life,” she says. “I went from being insecure to understanding that I was really standing on the shoulders of some truly amazing people. Newfound confidence and a sense of adventure propelled me forward as never before, and because of this, I dared to emigrate to the US by myself at age eighteen with a few dollars and a backpack.”

In 1999, inspired by her trailblazing relative, Guntur remembers literally spinning a globe to decide where life would take her next. It landed on Hawaii.

Soon she was off to enroll in Hawai‘i Pacific University for her undergraduate degree, where she met her husband-to-be. The duo moved to Chicago and got married, and Guntur attended Columbia College for a master’s degree in media management.

Today, she lives with her husband and daughter in Algonquin, Illinois, a far northwestern suburb of Chicago, where she is a professional genealogist and photo organizer who runs her own business, the Swedish Organizer LLC.

She attributes the unexpected discoveries in her own lineage to her passion for her current vocation and avocation.

In her research, she also found a female relative in the 1600s whose husband was a trader in the Baltic. But when he died, she jumped right in and took over the business.

“What better person to relay the emigrant tale to descendants of Scandinavian migrants than someone who is one,” she says. “I love helping people make their own discoveries. My family’s story was a gift to me and had a profound effect. Seeing that they went all the way back to the Vikings and that there was so much courage and adventure in their lives helped me explore and own that part of myself.”

LEGACY LESSON

“This is such an exciting time for people seeking their ancestry, and I encourage everyone to give it a try. If we don’t write our stories, they will get lost. You will discover something that will change your life in one way or another. I promise it will rock your world in a positive way. If more of us explored our histories and learned about the struggles people faced and overcame, I think we would have a more tolerant world.”

Setting Sail: How One Man’s Story Changed My Life–excerpt from blog by caroline Guntur

Great storytelling is a gift. Not only to you, but to those who follow in your footsteps.

I know this to be true because my sixth great-grandfather Michael Tengwall (1705–1777) left behind him a journal, written at the age of sixty. In it, he tells the story of his life in incredible detail. Not only does it include his day-to-day life in small-town Sweden, but it also has an amazing recount of his travels.

In 1738, he was appointed ship minister and destined to sail for Constantinople on the naval ship Sweden.

After leaving his family behind to go above and beyond the call of duty, his journey took a dramatic turn when the ship foundered and he was shipwrecked off the coast of Cadiz, Spain.

As I was reading about this horrifying experience, I was amazed at his resilience and courage. After losing many of his friends to the storm, he and a few others who survived were taken in by the locals, who graciously offered them housing, clothing, and food.

Fortunately, Michael was an educated man. He spoke Latin with ease and was able to communicate his way around. There was one man, Don Cesse, that Michael clearly bonded with despite their cultural differences. It was obvious that the mutual respect they had for each other translated well and formed a lasting friendship. Sure, there were moments of despair, as Michael doubted he would ever see his family again, but also moments of wonder as he explored the Spanish culture and spent time learning about their customs. After living in Spain for some time, his return to Sweden was arranged by the consul in Cadiz, and he eventually made it home to the family who had presumed him dead.

What an amazing adventure, right?

I was so happy to find a firsthand account of my ancestor’s life. Michael knew how to write captivatingly, by describing the sights, the smells, the textures of different fabrics, and the sounds of the church bells in the large Spanish coastal town. It was all in the details, and they were what really drew me in as a reader.

What was even more impressive was the balancing act he pulled off when writing this journal, because not only did he describe his travels so well, but he also somehow managed to describe his everyday life back in Sweden with the same amount of enthusiasm.

His trip was clearly a defining moment in his life, but it wasn’t the only defining moment. He poured his heart out in this journal, explaining how heartbroken he was when he lost his wife to disease, when his little son died in infancy, and when his daughter lost her life at the age of six. He was surprisingly honest about how he “somehow found the strength to continue living through all the tragedy that had befallen him.” His words made me wish I could have met him. It was absolutely fascinating to see just how fast life can change, and how fast the world keeps changing for all of us.

Reading this journal changed my life.

When I read Michael’s journal, I realized that I wasn’t the only person (and certainly not the first) in my family to have a thirst for knowledge and adventure. My bigger dreams started to make sense, and it gave me a sense of belonging and confidence that I had never felt before. It made me fearless and ready to see what would happen if I took a leap of faith. As you may have guessed, this newfound confidence completely changed the course of my life. Instead of staying in Sweden, I moved to Hawaii, met my husband, got married, moved to Chicago, started a family, and started my business in the family history field. That’s what good storytelling does: it takes you on a journey and then comes full circle when you learn something new about yourself. Great storytelling inspires, and it changes lives. If Michael hadn’t written in his journal, I may not have been equipped with the same attitude toward life that I have today.

One “Shaky Green Leaf”: Ancestry.com clue helps “bring runaway slave home”

During the day, Taneya Koonce makes her living researching medical breakthroughs, clinical trials, and important information for patients and physicians as the associate director of research for the Center for Knowledge Management at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. But almost every night when she returns home, she hits her computer and goes into private detective mode, building her family tree on Ancestry.com.

Researching her family’s lineage has been her passion since 2005. She quickly transformed her commitment to her avocation in becoming a dedicated volunteer in myriad local and national genealogy organizations. She’s president of Nashville’s Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, a member of the Tennessee State Library and Archives, and assistant state coordinator for the national USGenWeb Project.

It took her almost fifteen years to find the missing clue that she didn’t exactly know she was hunting for but that had been intuitively inspiring her relentless digging. It was one animated shaky green leaf (the icon for Ancestry.com hints that pops up to help seekers discover new information) that broke open the most intriguing and “overwhelming and impactful” clue ever, she says.

Koonce, mom of a fifteen-year-old daughter, says her fascination with her family story started when she was in college. During the summer of 1995, she spent time sitting beside both her grandmothers and taking notes about their lives. Over the years, both of them were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and the story capturing began to fade.

“I kept the notes, but there were many holes in their stories that I wanted to complete,” says Koonce.

That’s when she, in her own words, “became addicted” to Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, 23andMe.com, and other ancestry-seeking tools.

She rolled up her sleeves, hunting for information about both grandmothers, who were from Plymouth, North Carolina. Koonce was keenly aware that her family’s lineage would be a story of civil rights and enslaved peoples.

Her search traced back to the 1800s and uncovered an ancestor of her second great-grandmother, Martha Jane “Mattie” Walker McNair. The ancestor was Martha’s grandfather, Prince Walker, born in 1839 in Plymouth, Washington County, North Carolina.

One of the pieces of information she uncovered was Prince Walker’s 1899 death notice in the local newspaper. The finding was a startling one, she says, because during those times, it was not as common to find an obituary written about a Black man in a rural newspaper. The newspaper article, reflecting the blatant racism of the times, called this relative a “before the war darkie.” As she read this language, she understood that even though Prince Walker was enslaved, “he was considered a socially acceptable enslaved person by the white people then. They trusted him.”

For years, Prince Walker was where the trail stopped.

Until 2019, when a shaky Ancestry.com leaf popped up on her computer screen.

“I was on the website working on my family tree when the hint showed up that someone else had Prince Walker on their tree,” she says. But on this tree, Prince Walker had a son, Prince Walker Jr. (also known as John Prince Walker). The family details matched, including dates, names, and locations; this other family tree even had the obituary of Prince Walker (the elder) attached to the tree. Koonce realized that “apparently, this was indeed the same family” as her very own.

Koonce contacted the owner of the newly found family tree and discovered they were fourth cousins. That’s when the story began to unfold—stories the cousin had learned through oral history passed down by her ancestors.

She shares the story: John Prince Walker, the son of Prince Walker, was sold to the plantation next to where he had grown up in Plymouth, where his father still lived. He tried to escape multiple times. Eventually at fifteen he escaped and made his way to Rhode Island and freedom. There, he enlisted as a Buffalo soldier, an infantry unit made up of African American soldiers who mainly served on the western frontier following the American Civil War.

“What was so amazing about his story is that his father had harbored him in his cabin so he could make his escape,” says Koonce. “At the same time, his father was considered one of the slaves the plantation owners trusted, but he became this hero for his son. Somehow he was able to navigate his relationship with his owners and at the same time help his son toward freedom.”

The creativity and resourcefulness she’s found in Prince Walker and John Prince Walker’s stories has had a dramatic impact on her life, says Koonce. She says she’d always been fascinated by her family history and very sad about knowing her ancestors were enslaved, wondering what it would be like to be owned by these overseers and live in squalor.

“I love that my hobby links to what I do professionally, and that learning my family’s stories is teaching me so much more about what history was really like,” says Koonce. “When you learn about your family’s context in the larger story of history, it personalizes it in a very powerful way. I knew my ancestors must have been slaves, I’d read about what that must have been like in history books, but when I learned I had an ancestor who escaped all of that, it really put the background of what exists in so many African Americans’ homes in context for me. I went from living in a family that just never talked about any of this, except to once in a while say our relatives were sharecroppers, to really feeling what it must have been like.”

Through her own work uncovering her ancestor’s remarkable journey to freedom, Koonce has been inspired to use her ancestry detective skills to help others research hardship stories. Currently she is involved in the Fort Negley Descendants Project—an initiative to document and tell the stories of those who sacrificed at Fort Negley, told from their descendants’ point of view. Per the Vanderbilt University website, “The Fort Negley Descendants Project is an oral history digital archive aimed at preserving the voices and stories of the descendants of the African-American laborers and soldiers who built and defended Fort Negley.”¹⁰

Her research is also having a ripple effect in her own family. Recently she received a call from her father, who had just attended a funeral for a cousin.

“My dad thanked me for helping him understand how important it is to connect with and stay connected to our relatives,” Koonce says. Her brother also surprised her when he met with a relative, someone she discovered on Ancestry.com and connected with on Facebook. “He was on a business trip in Hawaii and saw we had a relative there, so reached out to meet him. It’s fun to see how the connections just keep happening.”

LEGACY LESSON

“I think learning about family history brings people together and helps us better understand the political and cultural climate that inspired our own lives. I think it gives us a better understanding of what we think are our differences. Instead of dividing us, they can help unite us. We all can really appreciate what our families have gone through and take these lessons of perseverance and put them into play in our own lives.”