Last week's episode, March 12, was quite moving. The show investigated the roots of the retired football star Emmitt Smith. Interestingly, as with Sarah Jessica Parker, the show ended up following a female line. The family of one of his ancestors, known as Prince Puryear, was found in the state of Alabama in the 1870 U.S. census, the first in which African Americans were counted as free people. The household included Prince's mother, Mariah, age 55, and the family was identified as Mulatto.
Puryear is a rather distinctive surname, and--not exactly a surprise--it turned out to have been the surname of the white family that had
owned Mariah and her children before Emancipation. Genealogists traced the Puryear family to Virginia, where the earliest record of Mariah that was said to be found was a
deed of 1826, when one Samuel Puryear deeded her--she would have been about 11 years old at the time--to his son Alexander Puryear--along with a horse and a bridle.
I found this episode incredibly moving. Genealogists will tell you that African American genealogy is very difficult because before Emancipation there just aren't the records that white families left behind. Many years ago, the ground-breaking miniseries
Roots, based on Alex Haley's book about his own family's history, was broadcast during my first semester in college. I subsequently read the book--but only once, and that a long time ago now, so my memories of it are kind of dim--but my memory is that
Roots is essentially a novelization. I don't remember how much actual historical research, beyond family legends, Haley put into it, and I don't mean to discredit Haley's work. But for me this one hour on Emmitt Smith's family history was much more meaningful and moving than
Roots because the story ended, starkly, with
an actual legal record, the
deed conveying Mariah from one Puryear to another.
Even more, since in that 1870 census the family was identified as Mulatto, it was clear that the family was not pure-blood African. Also, the Puryears had kept Mariah and her children--nothing was said about the father of her children--together, which was considered remarkable because Alexander Puryear was, as records showed, a slave trader. It was speculated, since the family was Mulatto, that Alexander Puryear kept Mariah and her children because Mariah may have been his half-sister. In other words, Alexander Puryear's father, Samuel Puryear, may also have been Mariah's father, and it was openly speculated that Mariah's birth was not the result of a consensual act.
A few other interesting points. Mariah's oldest daughter was given the same name as Alexander Puryear's wife. Also, while I had been thinking, sadly, that
Prince was a name for a horse, not for a human being ("the Artist" notwithstanding), it turned out that Prince Puryear's full name was actually
Prince Albert Puryear, and it struck me as weirdly amusing that a slave woman in antebellum Alabama had named her eldest son for Queen Victoria's husband.
Finally, Emmitt Smith had some genetic tests done, and the results showed that genetically, he is 82% African, 11% European (the white Puryears, no doubt), and 7% Native American. The African genes trace back to present-day Benin, in an area of West Africa that was formerly known as the Slave Coast.
