TAPESTRY: A Special Search for "Roots"

The desire to get a clearer sense of our own identity by searching for our roots - in family stories or in the return to particular places—strikes all of us at different times. Many people first thought about "roots" in the 1960s, when they read the best-selling book or saw the movie of that name by Alex Haley. The book followed Haley's search for his own ancestors—who had come into this country as slaves—as it expanded into a larger quest for his people's earliest origin in Africa.

Haley's book inspired many black Americans to undertake the research and writing of their family histories. Among them was James Rose, who grew up in New London, Connecticut in the 1960s, and was in New York taking an Oral History class at Queens College when the movie "Roots" came out. Through his teacher and the Kinte Library Project, Rose eventually met Alex Haley and began a serious search for his own genealogy.

James Rose's journey took him back in time, through family interviews, and back to the neighborhoods where he grew up. "On Saturday, July 20, [1973], the day of my thirty-second birthday, I left for New London. It took only two and a half hours.... Driving down toward Shapley Street I noticed right away that the whole black district had been wiped out by urban renewal. All of my old haunts were being torn down, and it was as if a whole part of me had been uprooted and lost to time...." As in most center cities, James Rose's familiar neighborhood contained many old and historically valuable buildings, which were to disappear forever.

Over the next six years, Rose's search, like Haley's, expanded. Beginning in New London, with the archives of the New London County Historical Society and town records, then moving farther afield to Hartford and other New England archives, he read through myriads of letters, account books, census and land records and manumission papers in an effort to piece together not only his own history but the collective history of the black community in Southeastern Connecticut. He interviewed many descendants of the old, original families who still remained in New London, Montville, Groton and the surrounding area.

One of the most important people Rose met in the course of doing his research was Barbara Brown, a white woman from Colchester, Connecticut, who had already begun to trace the genealogies of a number of Connecticut's black families back to colonial and Revolutionary times. Together they wrote Tapestry: A Living History of the Black Family in Southeastern Connecticut.

Tapestry was published by the New London County Historical Society in 1979, and is widely available in libraries throughout New England. Another important work by Brown and Rose, Black Roots in Southeastern Connecticut, 1650-1900 was published in 1980 by Gale Research Co., as part of the Gale Genealogy and Local History Series. For more information on these books and on the subject of Black Genealogy, go to Dr. Rose's website, Black Genesis.

Click here for excerpts from Tapestry.