A Heavyweight Find - A Wilder Search

Believe What You Preach

I am a fun-loving, joking kind of person most of the time. I sometimes make outlandish statements just to see what the other person says or to see the shock on their faces. You just never know what I'm going to say. Is all of it true - No! "I would love to play Lebron James just once and see if he could dunk over me," I once said. What??? I was just feeling it at the moment. "Well, I would have loved to play him at my prime!" Lebron would abuse me like a freight train running over a snail. I was watching my Golden State Warriors (I love to watch Stephon Curry play) and Lebron had just made one of those faces after a breakaway dunk. My wife looked on as I was watching with a look of disbelief on her face. "Whatever," she said as she laughed at me. All of that is well and good, but there comes a time where you have to believe what you preach - we are all related.

Super Tree - Does It Include Everyone?

I had been adding people to my Super Tree which I will abbreviate from now on as "my ST" (I may have to add a blog glossary later, who knows). But after adding about a hundred friends, I began to think - had I added any African Americans to my tree? No. Why? I thought some more. Because I didn't believe I could add them? I have many friends at the manufacturing plant where I work who are African American, and I hadn't gotten to them yet. But it came time to talk the talk. Did I believe we are all related? Yes. Then I had to find a way to add them into the tree. This was about a year ago that I had that thought. So I decided to see what I could do African American ancestry.

Deontay Wilder

One of the girls in the office has a last name of Wilder. Well, in Tuscaloosa here there is a famous Wilder - Deontay Wilder, WBC Boxing Heavyweight champion. Deontay is a fan favorite here and almost all of us follow his fights. He showed up at a church event several years ago that my youngest daughter Emily went to (a dodgeball tournament to make money for a charity). He is a very tall guy at 6' 7" but in person, you notice that the guy has the ankles of a gazelle. He can get around too as he proved during the dodgeball matches. Deontay was having a lot of fun just popping onto random teams to give that team a boost. My daughter is not the typical daughter. She is the athlete of the family. She plays soccer now, but she has played basketball, softball, volleyball to name a few. She is pretty much a pool shark and she once went to the NFL Punt, Pass and Kick Tennessee Titans championship as a 9-year-old (finishing third) and got us free tickets to see the Titans-Cardinals game. Her team was on the court and they were doing well and suddenly, BAMM! Deontay Wilder comes in for the other team. Well it was over at that point. As I was driving Emily home, I asked her if she had a good time. She said, "Well, I was having a good time until DEONTAY came in and ruined it. We would have won the tournament if it wasn't for him." Well, you just have to know Emily.

Well anyway, the girl at work had been telling people that Deontay was some sort of cousin of hers. I was talking to her one day soon after I made my decision to pick someone to try my skills at African American ancestry. I asked her if she knew how she was related to Deontay. She said she didn't really know but she said that it almost had to be true. I told her I was going to try to find the relationship and put my skills to the test. She said go for it.

Digging In

I started looking on google like I usually do when I add a new person to my tree. I found some articles in the local newspaper and found my friend's mother's name. I looked at Facebook and Advanced Background Search and after several minutes found her grandfather. I was finding that the investigation work wasn't going as smoothly as when I did this for white people. I found a census record in 1940 for her grandfather and his name was listed as Frankie Lee instead of Fletcher Lee. The names seem to be spelled differently or just plain wrong. Ancestry does not pick up from one census to another on African Americans as much (if someone appears in the 1920 census, then Ancestry sometimes lists other records that most likely is that same person). You have to really dig - seeing if other siblings show up in 1910 for that person as they did in 1920 for example. I have several theories on why this was the way it is: 1) the people taking the census did not understand the people being interviewed, 2) the people interviewing could not find the people being interviewed and relied on neighbors to get the information and 3) the people who interviewed did not care 100% about the accuracy of the information. I am hoping that it is more reason is #1 or 2 above, but I am suspecting some of #3 occurred as well. That's my opinion.

Other Problems with African American Historical Records

A big problem with African American historical records is that 1870 is the first U.S. census that they appear in. There are some property records I have seen from 1866 to 1870. So this means that you can search for your ancestors to about 4 and maybe 5 generations and then brickwall. Every now and again you see an 80 year old person born in 1800 appearing in the 1870 or 1880 census (making them born between 1790 and 1800). Alabama was formed as a state in 1819 with most people arriving in the Tuscaloosa area between 1820 and 1830. So in those instances, you get to see what state you ancestors came from before they came to Alabama (South Carolina and Virginia are the top two that I am seeing). From all of the research I have done, you can persevere and find more about African American ancestors, but you would really have to work at it and the records would have to exist. You can look up the white people whose surname was the same and who lived near the ancestors in question and you can research them and see if they owned slaves in the 1830-1860 censuses and look at the numbers of people listed as black in the various age ranges. You would need to look at property records to see if they listed the slaves in those records. Some of those records still exist and others do not. I have read about people who did searches like this successfully but they had to spend a lot of time doing this. One day I may try this and see if I can do it.

Back to the Wilders

Well, I did trace my friend's ancestry back to a Richmond Wilder who was born in 1798 in North Carolina. He was still living in the 1900 census in Pickens County, AL at over 100 years old. His wife Lucy was still living as well at age 85. They had been married for 69 years. Wow! Richmond was my friend's 4th ggf. I traced Deontay's ancestry back to Richmond Wilder as well. Richmond was his 3rd ggf. So my friend and Deontay are 4th cousins 1x removed. I told her and she was excited to learn that. She said now she could tell the story on how they were related with confidence!

Connecting African Americans to My Tree

I am still struggling with how to truly connect African Americans into my ST. I have not really done it. I have probably 8-10 African American people I am trying to connect (along with their ancestors) and all but one do not connect. They are just floating in my tree. You serious ancestry.com people know what I'm talking about. I did find a guy in the plant who had some white people among his ancestors and he ended up being 6th cousins with a white friend of mine. I told Melvin about this and he seemed to know about these white ancestors. I told my white friend and her eyes opened wide and she said, "Wow! Really?" Like she didn't believe it. I may write about Melvin's ancestors on another post. There is another African American girl here at the plant who has a grandfather that told people at his deathbed that his father was a white doctor in one of the small towns around here. I found that she was related to a white guy at the plant (4th cousins). I told them both and they both said they had worked with each other on some of their previous job tasks and they had a lot of respect for each other. For some reason, I don't think you usually say this when presented with facts like this, but this is the world we live in. 

If we could easily go back to 6 or 7 generations for African Americans, then I could better connect African American people in my tree. Since we have those 4-5 generations we can research in a relatively easy fashion, there are a lot of gaps. Maybe in the next few years I will learn some techniques that open up these prior generations.