Note to Audience: This is a post I wrote a few weeks ago, but then I found something. Something that changed the narrative. Confused the narrative. There was a part of me that when I found the document, I wanted to pretend I had never seen it. Because it made not only the narrative that I had built with historical documents not make sense, it made the oral history not make sense. But I reminded myself, good historians learn more and do better. So I am posting this again, with a few alterations. K:)

I have a love/hate relationship with oral family histories. On one hand I love them because they give character and vitality to the people who came before us. On the other hand, I hate them because they are famously inaccurate. And I am going to be very honest here. I feel incredibly guilty as a researcher when I have to tell any family that a narrative they love might not be the whole truth. I don’t want to be the person responsible for taking away something that means so much to someone’s identity.

The journey of a family story is like a game of Telephone over multiple decades and generations. Each person remembering facts that touched them, forgetting facts that didn’t, while adding to and perfecting the story. Oral tradition tends to either elevate or diminish. They are often colorful embellishments of the true facts. The job of a genealogist is to research every detail and find the grain of truth, the clues if you will, within an oral tradition and build an honest narrative backed by documents. But doing so often breaks the hearts of the people who identify with the oral history. It’s a tricky situation because oral tradition becomes deeply embedded in our DNA, it becomes a part of how we identify ourselves individually and our place in our collective history. Oral tradition is the heart and soul of the human experience.  

One of the historic homes I work for, Carnton, was a slave owning farm belonging to the McGavock family. An 1843 probate inventory for Randal McGavock’s estate listed twenty-two enslaved humans with their names and ages. However, the only narrative that existed about slavery at Carnton was a story published in the late 20th Century. Respected scholar and psychology teacher Dr. Emma White Bragg wrote proudly about her family in a short memoir in 1985. She did what all family elders should do, pass on the oral tradition as told to her. Bragg’s narrative was written from a very personal place and with immense pride in her heritage. If Emma Bragg’s oral tradition was the true story, I wanted to tell it. Every person deserves to have their story known and shared. Their true story.

Emma’s published version of her family’s oral tradition reads as follows:

On my father’s side of the family, my great grandmother was Ann, born in 1814, whose slave name was McGavock. The McGavock family’s mansion was called Two Rivers on McGavock Pike. 

Ann was a sister of Susanna, the trusted housekeeper servant of General William Harding of the Belle Meade Plantation, on Harding Pike.  Family oral history says that Ann went to New Orleans with her father, an English adventurer. They both contracted cholera from which her father died. Ann, however, recovered from cholera and returned to Nashville. Her sisters, Susanna, Jo Anna, Martha and Fannie had been left in Nashville in the protective custody of a white man, Randal McGavock, according to law. Upon hearing about the death of Ann’s father, Mr. McGavock claimed that she and her sisters over whom he had custody were his slaves. He gave Susanna to his daughter who married General William Harding of Belle Meade Plantation. Susanna remained at Belle Meade until her death. 

These five sisters had been considered free-born as their mother was an Indian, the law being that the status of the child was based on the mother’s status. The common ancestor of Ann and her sisters was Jonah, called “Grandma Jonah,” a full blooded Creek Indian who lived on Cedar Knob, now Capitol Hill, Nashville, Tennessee. 

In 1828, at the age of 14, Ann married John Richardson, a slave who later bought himself free after having chosen his name and convinced the legislature to accept it. John Richardson became a barber at the Commercial Hotel.

Ann and John Richardson had two children one of whom was my grandmother, Carrie Richardson, born in 1851. Carrie and her husband, Charles Henry White reared a large family of ten children on a forty-acre farm on Brick Church Pike five miles east of downtown Nashville. 

Ann was 81 years old when she died in 1895. Having suffered three strokes, she was paralyzed and couldn’t talk. My father, who was one of the ten children of Carrie and Charles White, remembered that when Ann came to live with them, she would walk with two sticks and just sit in a chair and slide from one chair to the bed or to another chair and that she stayed in one room and never went outdoors. This was about 1883 when my father was six years of age. 

She had served as a practical nurse to white doctors in Nashville, going from home to home, there being no Negro physicians at the time. Ann had no formal education but when she was very young, she had been hired out to Dr. Ewing of Franklin to be given an education by his wife, Mrs. Martha Ewing.—-EWB 

Emma White Bragg related this narrative perhaps as she had heard it, perhaps with a few more details. Emma never had children, but she passed her story along to her nieces and nephews and they in turn tell the story with the same passion and pride that she did. Her book cultivated a sense of history, family and belonging for her descendants. There is beauty in the simplicity of these very human narratives. Her pride in her story pushed her to publish it and to share it with not only her family but the world. Thus it was shared with me.

The problem I was having with this narrative was that, technically there were so many inaccuracies. Things that sat on the top of my brain and wouldn’t stop nagging me. Human stories are often scandalous, but they should make sense. You should be able to say: “I can see that.” There were innocent mistakes, the sisters were not enslaved at Two Rivers, they were enslaved at Carnton and in Bragg’s published book, an image of the wrong “Randal McGavock” was included. Those errors were easily made, easily noted and easily fixed. The details that nagged me the most were how did a “full blooded Creek Indian” and an “English adventurer” have black babies? It was suggested perhaps I was missing a generation? Perhaps. But even more nagging, we all know about paternalistic societies and history, men are remembered, women? not so much. But in this story, the Native woman who died was remembered, but her husband’s name was forgotten? In what scenario is this EVER the case. 

One of the most challenging parts of my job is when I am sorting through narratives and I cannot find the documents to back up a story that people are emotionally attached to. But, it is important work. I will repeat what I said earlier “Every person deserves to have their story known and shared. Their true story.” Responsible historians learn more and DO better. And every time a new resource is digitized, I look for documents that could prove or disprove all the narratives that exist. Even if I think I have it all figured out. I still look for more. Regardless of the information found, we must follow the trail of clues to see where they lead. Because what I teach people now, what I write about now…my words will impact people from this moment moving forward. It is a responsibility that I take very seriously.

My hope that Emma is watching down on me and she sees and knows that I appreciate her. I appreciate her dedication to and her love for her family. I hope she knows I see that. In fact, Emma gave me the tiniest clue, a detail she gave about her grandmother’s life that she perhaps didn’t know was as important as it was. That detail helped me to create a living breathing narrative for her grandmother and break through a decades old brick wall. I’m gonna call this teamwork. So thank you Emma. She knew family stories are intrinsically vital to the human experience. They create pride, power and community.

History cannot be changed, it is discovered. Facts are often hidden, but waiting to be uncovered. The danger comes when one does not look further and perpetuates a story that feels…off. When I say this, I mean the family story and the documented narrative. Fact by fact and document by document I was able to uncover the true story of Ann Wright Richardson.

To be cont…