Who do you think you are? Ask the Library of Virginia.

We’re moving soon and our new house sits on land that’s been in my family for generations. Wanting a clearer picture of the ancestors who passed the property down to us, my husband and I asked my aunts, our family historians, to do some genealogical sleuthing. They identified our long-dead relatives who settled the land after the Civil War but, just as interestingly, they uncovered a deed for a nearby family parcel that contained a racial covenant. 

The white parties in the 1940 deed agreed “not to sell the above described real estate to any one not of the caucasian race for the period of twenty-five (25) years from this date, with the exception of five acres thereof situated in the Northwest corner of the above described real estate which may be sold to Sally Bowles (colored).”

Sally Bowles was my great-great-aunt and a Black woman entrepreneur in western Hanover County. White people in the area paid her to do their laundry and that’s probably why they deigned to sell her five measly acres of the 272 acres they were selling. Besides being proof of the historic, systemic exclusion of Black families from wealth building in Virginia and other southern states, my lingering questions about who my people were presents an opportunity to visit the Library of Virginia.

Biased lending is a major barrier to Black homeownership in Virginia, still

The Library, founded in 1823, is the state’s deepest trove of Virginia’s cultural history and includes over 130 million books, maps, periodicals and other materials that tell the story of who we were and are. Since 2014, the Library has offered a genealogy workshop series to teach people how to use its records and other resources to research their heritage and family lineage. 

“We really began the series by focusing on beginning genealogy and then began expanding it to more specific types of records over the years,” Ginny Dunn, the Library’s Archives & Library Reference Services Manager, emailed me. “Our military records, African American genealogy, and immigration records workshops have been among the most popular workshops.”

I understand exactly why the African American genealogy workshop draws a lot of interest; although Black history doesn’t begin with slavery, that brutal institution robbed many Black families of being able to trace their roots beyond its reaches. That longing for our family, for knowing who we truly are and where they came from, has never left some of us. But finding out more about one’s familial past is a curiosity nearly everyone will experience at some point in their life. 

About “one-in-seven U.S. adults (15%) say they have ever used a mail-in DNA testing service from a company such as AncestryDNA or 23andMe,” a Pew Research Center survey found in 2019. Eighty-seven percent of people who have used one of the kits said they did it to “learn more about where their family came from,” while 36% did it to “get information about their health or family medical history” and another 36% wanted to “connect with relatives they might have but didn’t know about.” People are getting to know themselves like never before and in our state, the Library of Virginia can aid those inquiries.

“Many times when people come to the Library, they’ll say to us, ‘I want to search for my family,’ but they don’t know how to do it or what to do,” Dunn said. “We lead them through the steps, help them figure it out, and tell them you always start with yourself and work your way back through the records.”

This year’s series kicked off March 1 with a workshop that introduced 22 beginners to genealogical research, led by Dunn and education and program specialist Anne McCrery. Dunn said the attendees enjoyed the experience and “asked a lot of questions.”

In mid-April, the Library hosted the second workshop, “How to Trace Your Virginia Roots,” and the series will continue May 3 with a workshop on how to use little-known records — including “Virginia penitentiary records, Prohibition Commission records, state mental hospital records, court order books” — to trace Virginia genealogy. The series runs through October. 

The things we find out about our kin when we dig into our family history may surprise us. I learned, for instance, that my great aunt Lillian — niece of Sally, mentioned above —  was a nightclub singer and pianist who performed frequently in Richmond’s historic haven of Black culture, Jackson Ward, in its heyday. How glamorous she sounds! I’d been researching (often at the Library, sometimes assisted by legendary historian/then-director of educational and outreach services Gregg Kimball) and writing about Jackson Ward for years without realizing I had a personal connection to the area.

Others may find themselves similarly shocked.

“We had a patron find that her grandmother’s real name was different than she thought and also that she was married a different year than she had been told,” Dunn told me. “Another interesting thing that people have found is that a physical description of an ancestor (often found on a military pension record) is very similar to a living descendant.” She’s also seen “people who found something about their ancestry that is very emotional, and they’ll start crying. You just don’t know if it’s crying in a good way or something upsetting.”

Learn more about the workshop series, and potentially yourself, on the Library’s website. 

Editor’s note: This column has been updated to reflect the total number of items in the Library’s collection.