History is, on the one hand, individual stories and, on the other, stories of groups, nations and cultures. In my recollection of classes I took when I was in college, the starting point was the latter, but in my recent experience of trying to write history, I began with individual stories I found in the Johnson Collection in the Cumberland County Historical Society - a collection of letters and papers of an African-American family in Carlisle. In trying to discover what was going on in the lives of the writers of these letter, I have had to turn for help to the larger stories of our country and the ways in which we have included and defined the role of people of African descent from the earliest settlements through the Civil War period.
When I first began my study, it became important for me to establish the family relationships among the people described in the letters. The collection was named after the parents of the donor, Louise Johnson Austin, and my first question was why no Johnson appeared among the letter writers. As evidence emerged from the letters and from the family Bibles, I made a simple chart of the family relationships that helped me to understand that these people were the matrilineal ancestors of Anna Andrews Johnson, Louise's mother. In doing this, I discovered that genealogy is a valuable tool for a fledgling historian. With kind assistance from the librarians at the Cumberland County Historical Society, I found my way into the public sources of information available to the genealogist: census reports, tax records, court documents, church and cemetery records, street directories, and military records. These resources helped me to answer some of the questions the letters posed.
I want to tell the story of the Johnson Family because the collection gives the rare opportunity to reconstruct the lives of persons in a group often silenced in American history: people of African descent. My first reading of the family's letters introduced me to a strong- willed, resourceful, brave, and often witty group of people, and I wanted to read those lives in the context of the times in which they lived. To do that, I found that I needed to augment what genealogy had taught me with more general local and national history. The reconstructing of parts of one of those lives, that of Reuben Washington, provides a particularly good illustration of the impossibility of separating the personal from the public, of genealogy from history, in understanding the past.
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