Most of us know our parents and maybe our grandparents. Past that, the trail goes cold fast, especially for Black families, because the records were never built to keep our names. I've spent years researching my own family, and I want to share what I've found, starting at the beginning.
The earliest ancestor I can trace with confidence is Chester Edmondson, born in Lenoir County, North Carolina, in the 1830s. Chester was born enslaved, and he was a grown man when freedom came in 1865. Our family name was later shortened to Edmonson, but on this site I've kept the original two-D spelling, Edmondson, to honor him.
Lenoir County was in the middle of the war's final chapter. The Battle of Wyse Fork, near Kinston, was fought in March 1865, and Union forces took the town soon after. The Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery nationwide, was ratified that December. For people like Chester, freedom meant starting over: choosing a surname, looking for family members who'd been sold away, finding work and building a household from nothing.
The 1870 federal census matters enormously for Black genealogy. It was the first census to list formerly enslaved people by name, which is why so many family trees can be traced back to 1870 and then hit a wall. Chester appears in that census, and that's how I confirmed him.
Chester's son Bryant was one of four children. Raising a family after emancipation meant farming, working hard for little and holding on to community, church and land wherever it could be held. Those years are the foundation of everything that came after.
Two generations of service followed. My great-great-grandfather served in the Army in World War I, in the 302nd Battalion. Most Black soldiers in that war were assigned to labor and service units rather than combat units, doing the work that kept the army moving: unloading ships, building roads, hauling supplies. It was essential and too often overlooked. My grandfather served in the Navy in World War II as a cook. For much of the early war the Navy kept Black sailors mostly in the messman branch, which handled cooking and food service, and those men served bravely anyway. Feeding hundreds of sailors in the middle of a war is real work, and it deserves to be remembered. I'll go deeper on both in Part Two.
I'm doing this research to pass it on to my son and my granddaughter, and because the stories of ordinary Black families are part of American history too. I'm still digitizing documents, photographs and records, and I'll add them as I go. If you're researching your own family, I'd love to hear from you through the contact page, and you can watch more stories like this on Nagast TV on Roku.