A man who was emancipated in the birthplace of Juneteenth after being enslaved for 30 years finally got his long-lost wish of reuniting his family after his descendants met for the first time.
Like any nation in the world, The United States has a long and complicated history that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the people who made it must now reckon with.
This is why Juneteenth — the national holiday born from an emancipation order that Union army Major General Gordon Granger brought to Galveston, Texas — is such an important day for Black history in America and why recent years have seen more examples of Black Americans reclaiming places that were once used to exploit their ancestors.
And while there is something powerful about preserving what your forebears were able to build and achieve , it’s hard to imagine how rewarding it would feel to make the dreams they put into the world over 150 years ago finally come true.
Well, it seems that’s precisely what one mother-daughter duo and Ancestry.com were able to do.
In 1837, Hawkins Wilson was born into slavery in Virginia.
And as an Instagram post promoting the Ancestry documentary A Dream Delivered revealed, he would be separated from his family and moved to another state by the time he was six years old.
According to Good Morning America, he would eventually live as a free man in Gavelston, Texas 24 years later at the age of 30. After his emancipation, his first priority was to find his lost family.
This led him to contact the U.S. Freedman’s Bureau, which was established to help the formerly enslaved transition into life as a citizen and reconnect them with their families.
The documentary made it clear that few of these families were ever reunited and in Wilson’s case, that’s because his letters were sent to the wrong county. Although he had hoped that his sisters and mother were still alive, it’s unknown if he ever met them again.
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As he wrote to one of his siblings at the time, “Dear Sister Jane, your little brother Hawkins is trying to find out where you are and where his poor old mother is. Let me know and I will come to you.”
But while those letters may have not helped Wilson, they were the key that helped his great-granddaughter Alva Marie Jenkins and her daughter Kelley Dixon Tealer find their long-lost relatives.
After they learned about him from Ancestry genealogist Dr. Nicka Sewell-Smith, the two women from Houston were able to find the descendants of Wilson’s uncle Jim after Sewell-Smith matched the names he had mentioned with the Freedman Bureau’s records.
As a result, they embarked on a journey to the plantation where Wilson spent much of his early life and met their sixth cousins Valerie Gray Holmes and Linda Epps Parker.
And from the sounds of it, it almost didn’t feel like these distant relatives were meeting for the first time.
As Epps Parker said, “I felt like I had known Kelley and her mom all my life. I felt connected to them. It just was genuine.”
And these recent revelations have made the family as invested in what became of Jane as Wilson was and they hope to meet her descendants one day.
But at the moment, they also feel heartened that they were able to make Wilson’s dream come true at all.
In Tealer’s words, “He got to be smiling. ‘I didn’t make it, but they did.'”
h/t: Good Morning America , Instagram | @ancestry