WHEN I went to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City last month, I discovered that my great-grandfather Harvey Howard, on my father's side, was a mulatto who owned large tracts of land around Flowood, Miss. I also learned he fought in the Civil War, maybe as a mercenary rebel for the South, in exchange for his freedom. On my mother's side, I was able to go back four generations to Texas and the Carolinas where I discovered some amazing information, including a double wedding involving my great-grandfather and his brother to two sisters, one of whom was Mary Bland, the person my mother, Mary Bland-Cobb, was named after. What made this family roots search so meaningful was that it happened in a serendipitous, unplanned fashion. I had gone to Salt Lake City on a tour organized by the Four Seasons Concerts group. I thought I was going to spend most of my time being the only male escort for 18 wonderful elderly women as we toured Salt Lake's historic Mormon sites and listened to the annual Christmas concert of the famed Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Our tour guides, Sid and Bill Price, former Californians who once owned Presto Prints before volunteering to serve their church, gave our group special treatment when they discovered we were from the Bay Area. During my free time, they introduced me to Glenn Rudd, author of "Pure Religion," a book I had reviewed in October in the newspaper. They also introduced us to Marie Taylor, the Family History Center's resident expert on African-American research issues. Ophelia Holly, a retired teacher/administrator who had served as vice principal at King Estates Junior High School and had taught for 20 years in the Oakland public school system, and I were shown some rare books and research aids by Taylor. At once I was hooked. Both Holly and I began to seek information starting in Oklahoma. I started in Muskogee, where my mother was born and married my father. Holly was born in Mohawk, which is near Tulsa. She was trying to trace her American Indian heritage and her husband's ancestors in the "trail of tears" in an effort to show that "we should be proud of all aspects of our ancestry," Holly said. Digging up one's past provides a unique sharing of life experiences and feelings about slavery and discrimination. I discovered that Holly's hobby was printing, which is one of mine, and that because of discrimination she couldn't get in the printer's union so she went back to school to become an educator. She also told me her nephew is the former director of Oakland's Native American Friendship House. While I lauded Holly's noble statement about pride in mixed ancestry, I found myself fighting back my own trail of tears when I began to visualize my ancestral flesh and blood from the documents Taylor helped me locate. The slave property records showed that my great-great-grandfather Isaiah Bland really was named Isaac. While noticing how many slaves often named their children after biblical figures before some adopted the names of their slaveowners, I was reminded of the words of Oakland black genealogist Electra Price. She said whites who have records of family slaveholdings could be helpful to blacks who are trying to research the period before 1870, the first year that blacks are listed by name, color and occupation in the census. I then asked Taylor if the center kept records of whites who were ashamed or embarrassed by their ancestor's slave-holding past.
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