The Multicultural Academic Student Services (MASS) hosted an event about African American migration in Michigan in honor of Black History Month on Feb. 13.

Katie Hater, a junior at Central Michigan University majoring in communication science disorders, said the event was designed to generate interest in students to discover their own ancestry, like her learning that she is named after her grandmother Katie.

For Hater, learning about African American migration to Michigan started with an interesting piece of family history, she said.

Interested in learning more about her family's past, Hater said she found out that her first documented ancestor was enslaved at a rice plantation in South Carolina in the 18th century in a discovery that pushed her to keep going.

She found that distant relatives of her family were able to buy the land they were formerly enslaved on and hold it to this day. Even holding educational tours on the land on the impact of slavery, she said.

“It just inspired me to continue researching and finding out more,” Hater said.

It was through this interest that Hater eventually found Rozalyn Kelly through a local library. Kelly is a retired attorney with over 30 years in genetical research focused on African American ancestry and co-President of the Farmington Genealogy Society in Farmington Hills.

Kelly spoke with passion about the practice of genealogy and about the history of African Americans in Michigan she discovered through Webex to a crowd of more than 40 event attendees.

She spoke first of a man named William J. Hardy, who was born in New York in 1823 and became Michigan’s first African American elected public office and the first Black American to own land in Kent County. He purchased 93 arches of land in Gaines Township at the age of 23, and was elected supervisor in 1872 after the passage of the 15th Amendment.

Kelly also shared to accomplishments of Frank W. May, a former slave from Kentucky who came to Michigan in 1881 that she found out she was related to. May was a lumber scaler who owned a sprawling, multi-state business. He was able to retire off the business's profits at the age of 55 with $50,000 (The equivalent of $1,000,000 in today’s money).

“Everyone I know who does genealogy does it to remember those people that came before them,” Kelly said. “Knowing where I came from helps me to know where I’m going. And because of them, I can survive the circumstances that they dealt with in their time."

The focus, Kelly said, was on those who were living in Michigan before the Great Migration, primarily on those who did not come from the south but from other parts of the United States who she had a lot questions for and about.

“Who were these people and what were they doing?" she asked. "What type of work were they doing? Why did they come here, and when did they come here?”

Kelly brought up other specific and vivid accounts of both free and formerly enslaved African Americans that she herself documented and researched, to give a history of the lives of African Americans in Michigan during the mid to late 19th century.

It was a time when Michigan was a popular destination for African Americans due to its proximity to Canada, which outlawed slavery in 1833 and Michigan’s own prohibition on slavery inside the state since 1835.

She used a man named Thomas Braxton as an example, who lived in Marquette with a nephew who she found in the 1900 United States Census. Looking at his immigration record, Kelly said Braxton was born in Canada in 1854 and immigrated to the United States in 1874 with a listed occupation as a barber.

Kelly also looked at city directories, and traced Braxton's record life to Detroit in 1885, the City of Ironwood, and then a marriage record showing that he married Vivid Smith in 1901 and became the proprietor of his own barber business and own a home with his wife and three children until at least 1940.

Kelly said that examples like those could be found in anyone’s own family and discovered through a variety of the same methods she has used. Some of these methods include:

Interviewing family members about their stories and relations,
Charting pedigree charts,
Attaining records such as census records, marriage records, church records, military records and more,
Using free, online resources like Family Search, and paid services like ancestry.com, and
Accessing records from libraries.

Kelly said DNA can also be a tool, but cautioned it must be backed up with documentation and records that prove lineage. For African Americans in particular, Kelly said, there is the additional difficulty of getting through what she called the “brick wall.”

“When we’re looking at African American research, enslaved persons were not reported in the federal census until 1870 after the civil war,” she said. “(That’s) what’s called the 'brick wall.' It makes it difficult for us to get beyond that 1870 time period. But it is possible."

Kelly said her own experience with discovering her family, including her aunt Dorothy, who went to Michigan Normal College, now Eastern Michigan University, built her into the person that she is now.

"It helped to shape who I am, and it ties in with all the things that my father told me. My mother and my father, my father's family," Kelly said. "You can do anything you want to do. Don't let anybody tell you can't."