Joyce Huston’s Ferguson home could easily be confused with a local history museum.
There are vintage family photos on her living room walls and a family Bible turned heirloom sitting in the entryway. In her office, there are fireproof cabinets full of vital family records and a photo of the plantation her ancestors were forced to live and work on in Woodville, Mississippi.
Huston, a blues recording artist who goes by the name Lady J, has always been fascinated with her maternal family history. Her O’Kelley side has held reunions every other year since 1939, with a only a few breaks.
“I was always intrigued by the stories. Every reunion, we would have someone tell a story, then we give an oral history [of the family],” Lady J said. “I wanted to give more than just oral history, which was valuable, but I wanted to get it in writing and document as much as I could, and then I became addicted to the process.”
Her addiction is noticeable. Not one room in her home is untouched by family history. One room includes photos of her maternal grandfather, who was a buffalo soldier – a member of the Black troops who served in the segregated U.S. military. She even has marriage bonds of her enslaved ancestors. Her basement holds a one-room shrine to her family that tells a story of her family’s existence. It starts with photos of her great-great-grandmother and one of her slave owners.
Lady J’s discovery of her enslaved ancestors is rare. Many African Americans find tracing their ancestors before 1870 difficult because census records at the time listed the enslaved as property instead of people. Staff from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture spent weeks in St. Louis this fall to help Black people find their ancestors using online genealogy tools and preserve family history with digital techniques. The initiative, known as the Community Curation Program, began in 2017 in Baltimore and has since traveled to Chicago, New Orleans, Nashville and Denver.
“It is very important to have that collective story of your family and that collective history,” said Doretha Williams, director of the Center for the Digitization and Curation of African American History.
Black St. Louisans, including Lady J, who attended the museum’s workshops learned about preserving Black cemeteries and neighborhoods, ways to improve their oral history recordings and how to better understand genealogy.
The initiative is solely for the Black community, and the museum will not collect any information from the families or retain the rights to any documents or photos discovered during the workshops without permission, Williams said.
“People understand that we're not here to misuse narratives,” Williams said. “We're not here to steal your items, and we're here to support the collective understanding of what it means to preserve local histories.”
Many attendees took advantage of the museum’s mobile digitization truck. The white, air-conditioned truck was parked behind Cardinal Ritter High School and contained a film scanner and VHS and cassette tape converters. The staff members also digitized other formats, including 16mm and 8mm film. While in St. Louis, they converted nearly 4,500 hours of home videos, audio cassettes and motion picture films to contemporary formats and put them on USB drives.
Black families should have footage of uplifting or memorable moments in their family history that are digitized and not on obsolete equipment, said CK Ming, a media conservation and digitization specialist for the museum.
“Our history is already buried, elided or told wrong,” Ming said. “Having things that are joyful, that are vacations, that are us accomplishing things — it's really important for people to see and for families to see.”
Some in the region are clocking long hours combing through personal archives, searching government records and Googling anything that can connect them to enslaved ancestors and their slave owners or Black St. Louisans who lived in the area centuries ago.
Ronald Wilson came to the museum’s Freedmen’s Bureau workshop in September to learn about a search portal that holds over a million African American records from after the Civil War.
Wilson is a member of the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge of Missouri, and he has been researching the grand lodge and its past members for years. He said Prince Hall members have had a major impact on St. Louis and Missouri and are often forgotten about.
“Our job is to go and dig it up and then share it,” Wilson said, who is also the lodge’s archivist. “I was taught it doesn't make sense to dig it up and you don't share it, then nobody learns.”
During the workshop, Wilson learned how to look up educational records in the search portal, so he could do more genealogical research on Black Masons in Missouri. He’s especially interested in past lodge member Moses Dickson, who was a co-founder of Lincoln University in Jefferson City.
“We have had somewhere between 40 and 47 grand masters who started serving from 1865,” he said. “Part of what I'm looking for is any information I can find on those men.”
Many African American family documents have not been preserved, and the documents from very wealthy families dominate the archives, said Miranda Rectenwald, curator of local history in special collections at Washington University Libraries.
“In more recent years, we have purposely been trying to connect with members of the community, people who have attended Wash U, people who have done things here,” she said. “Many of those are African American families and LGBTQ individuals who are not otherwise documented in the archives.”
Lady J donated boxes of her O’Kelley family videotapes, portraits, vintage Vashon High School class reunion pictures and audio of her ancestors describing what slavery was like for their parents or grandparents.
She brought her family memories to Wash U and to the Missouri History Museum so her family stories could help inspire other Black St. Louisans to consider their family archives as treasures that should be viewed by many instead of boxed away in storage.
“We are part of America,” she said. “If we don't contribute to repositories like this, our story won't get told.”
