By Holly Kozelsky
An appeal for volunteers set China Martin’s research back in the right direction
The content of a social media post by the MHC Historical Society led China Martin of Martinsville to a breakthrough on her research into her family’s roots.
Martin, 32, had spent a great deal of time earlier on researching her genealogy, but she had taken a break from that for 3 months, she said. Then one day she glanced over a page of the “Henry County Freed Negro Registry, 1842-1860” on the MHC Historical Society’s Facebook page and found the names of her great-great-great-grandparents.
That discovery ended her break and put her right back on the pathway to documenting her lineage.
An involved search
Martin’s interest in discovering her family’s roots started at a family reunion on her father’s side. He is Marcus Hughes of Martinsville. Though the family on the side of her mother, Sherricka Martin Hughes, has rich connections in the Martinsville-Henry County area, she didn’t know much about her father’s side, because they were from Ohio.
At the reunion, “we found out that my great-great-grandmother was Caucasian. That just stunned me — like, ‘Who am I, for real?’ — That made me start genealogy.”
Martin delved into researching her family’s heritage at the Bassett Historical Center and by pouring through census records and websites such as Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com. For months, she studied and made comparisons of “birth certificates, marriage certificates, name changes” and more, gathering information that she sees as centering for not just herself but also her children, Taimir,14; Safarii, 13; Taiyon, 9; and August, 4.
“The most exciting thing to find out is discovering I am a direct descendent of both the big slave owners as well as the slaves,” she said.
Making sense of the old records and the connections they reveal requires the mindset of a detective, riding the waves of the then-common practice of name variations, children moving between households and birthdays that often were more estimates than actual day-of documentations as they are now.
Virginia Manumission Project
In February, the Historical Society received an email from Sydney Gilbert of Liberty University. She is the volunteer coordinator for Virginia Manumission Project done by Liberty’s History Department. “Manumission” means release from slavery.
Gilbert’s email explained: “The Virginia Manumission Project is dedicated to locating, transcribing, and digitizing all available manumission documents from Virginia between 1782 and 1865, making them publicly accessible. To date, we have published 2,000+ documents from 73 Virginia counties in our online database. These records are essential to understanding Virginia’s legal, social, and genealogical history and to restoring visibility to individuals whose lives often go unnoticed in the historical record.”
Gilbert asked for help in their search for volunteers who would transcribe (type out what had been in handwriting) historical manumission documents. The Historical Society posted that request, along with a few images of the documents, on its Facebook page. That’s what Martin saw.
Voices from the Past
“The manumissions they are opening up — they are pretty much like voices” from the past, Martin said. With them, “we are going to be able to attach and connect what’s missing.”
Excited by her findings, Martin visited the MHC Heritage Museum. There, she looked through the museum’s copy of Beverly Millner’s “Cohabitation Register of Henry County, Virginia—Register of Persons of Color Cohabitating Together as Husband and Wife The 27th Day of February 1866.”
This is a bound, alphabetized copy of the original registry compiled in 1866; before then, enslaved people were not allowed to marry legally, so this takes the place of marriage registries and is important for researching family history.
When Millner, of Axton, gave the Historical Society a copy of his book in June 2024, he said he would like everyone to know about his book and hopes that as many people as possible would find it useful to trace their family histories.
That’s just what Martin did, finding even more information on her family. She discovered her grandmother’s great-grandparents, among other relatives. The discovery made her grandmother cry, she said.
“Those names I’ve already been looking at, so to see that from Liberty University, I was like, ‘Wow!’. It’s like a dream come true, because I’ve been doing this for months.”
On top of everything, those discoveries came the day before an anniversary Martin had been dreading — Feb. 5, the fifth anniversary of the death of her beloved brother, Ke’ilo Martin.
The discovery of her ancestors during an otherwise sad time was “my ticket to keep going,” she said. “Not only that, but I want people to get more interested in this. … I think Henry County has got a lot of stories to tell.”
Buoyed by the excitement of her own findings, Martin has since been volunteering with the Manumission Project. Her first day of transcribing manumission documents was the anniversary of her brother’s death, a day of mourning her family turned also into a day of helping other people connect with their family members before them.
Manumission Project
For more information on Liberty University’s Manumission Project, visit manumissionproject.omeka.net .
To inquire about volunteering to transcribe documents, email Sydney Gilbert, Virginia Manumission Project Volunteer, at sggilbert@liberty.edu.
