Genealogy and Racial Identity

Yesterday morning while sitting in church I was thinking about race in the U.S. and how it relates to my field, genealogy. I wasn't really playing mental hooky because we had a guest African American preacher who was discussing racial issues. Many documents that we use to piece together our family histories contain some kind of racial identification. These categories are very distinct: black, white, Asian, etc., or sometimes the updated terms African American and Caucasian.  But racial identity can be far more complex than these labels indicate.

This past year I helped a friend of a friend with her family history. She had been gathering sources for years, and had amassed many, many documents. But she was still confused as to how to interpret and piece together the facts that she could pull from the documents. And certain pieces of the puzzle still seemed to be missing. Her family going back many generations was based in New Orleans, where my father's side of the family goes back several generations also. Even though I don't live in New Orleans any more, I have been scrutinizing area records for years.

It seemed to me that the confusion surrounded one of her direct ancestors named Eugene. We could not find a civil birth record for him or his siblings. His father was a European immigrant, but his mother was a Louisiana native who was listed under more than one surname; neither one was the same surname that her children bore. Neither could we find a marriage record for Eugene's parents. We sent off for some Roman Catholic church records, which helped. Also, we scrutinized again the U.S. census records that we could find for the family members. Conclusion: Eugene's mother was a free woman of color who was the mistress of Eugene's European immigrant father. Though some white men in New Orleans were quite open about their illegitimate mixed race offspring, Eugene's father was not, and so never registered his children's births in Orleans Parish. But Roman Catholic baptismal records for some of them exist. Some death records for Eugene and his family members also exist, but their evidence is confusing.  Some list his relatives as white, some list them as colored, and some lack any racial designation at all. It could be that the clerk who composed them was careless--or it could be that faced with a racially ambiguous family he chose not to classify them.

It turned out Eugene's mother's name varied because she used the surname of the man she had been involved with before Eugene's father on some records. Eugene himself "passed" as white. He had children with two different white women, one of whom he was married to. Then he had a long-term relationship with a woman of color, with whom he also had children. His wife then divorced him. He ended up dying at a fairly young age from tuberculosis. All this was quite a complicated story to piece together, and descendants from his different partners seemed unaware of his other families. Eugene's story was not unusual in a city that had a complex three tier racial caste system from the beginning of its history: whites, blacks, and free blacks of color who were usually mixed race.

Louisiana lawmakers have always struggled to categorize and legislate its mixed race population. For many years. if a person had just one drop of African blood, he or she was considered "black." So many blacks in Louisiana, in reality mostly Caucasian, and who did not even appear black, could still legally be born slaves. The state legislature passed a law in 1970 which attempted to mathematically define whiteness and blackness. It stated that a person with more than 1/32 “Negro blood’ was defined as black; anyone with African heritage of less than that amount could be considered white. The problems with trying to impose mathematical formulas on racial heritage were enormous, and the law was repealed in 1983.

It is my fervent hope that one day we will not have racial designations on documents any more. The heritage of too many people defies easy racial categorization. The idea of racial identity also involves cultural identity, i.e. what culture does a person most identify with, rather than mere genetics. As Martin Luther King Jr. observed, there are far more important issues than skin color.