Family Traveling

Travel Stories: A relative warned him: Don't go digging up ghosts. But Jeff Biggers crossed the Ohio River, seeking his ancestors' long-buried history.

05.25.04 | 9:41 PM ET

Maysville, KentuckyPhoto of Maysville courtesy Jackie’s Gateway Properties.

Heading south, I crossed the Ohio River on a clattering bridge into Maysville, Kentucky. No one in my family had been back to this town in more than four generations, dating back to 1865, when my great-great-grandfather crossed the river in the opposite direction, heading northwest to Illinois. He left behind a successful hemp farm. He never spoke about his Biggers family again; two generations later, my grandfather in Illinois wasn’t even sure if we came from Kentucky. In truth, he didn’t want to know.

I wasn’t alone on the genealogical highway. The recovery of our nation’s historical memory has followed a sort of contrary road in the Unites States today. An estimated 113 million living souls are searching in some capacity for their beloved dead. Until recently, I had never really sought out my family’s past; I was always a bit dubious of the genealogical minions. Then, while I was living in a remote canyon in Mexico a few years ago, I learned that my mother’s 200-year-old family log cabin in southern Illinois, the only remaining landmark in our quintessentially transient American family, had been destroyed by a strip coal mine. Other than a couple of photos, I literally possessed no familial remnant beyond my grandparents.

As a longtime traveler and chronicler of other cultures, I suddenly felt adrift and in need of an ancestral anchor. So, I crossed over the river.

Maysville sits on the northeastern edge of the Kentucky bluegrass, where the fringe of the Appalachian mountains trundles into hills. The town hugs the banks of the Ohio as an important gateway to the Midwest. It served as one of the key routes on the Underground Railroad in the 1800s. Perched along a high bluff, Maysville’s riverfront porches and brick buildings still stand as monuments to the 19th century; Daniel Boone ran a saloon here in the 1820s. Rosemary Clooney kicked up her heels and belted out songs as a child star more than a century later.

I returned to Maysville in search of my family history. Thanks to Shera Biggers Thompson, a distant cousin I had encountered on a genealogy Web site, I had learned that my forefathers had drifted across the Appalachians as pioneers and cleared a farm near Maysville in the village of Washington. She had chronicled our family history back to Scotland in the mid-17th century. But there was a missing link in Maysville.

The Internet has become a prime center for family traveling. There are literally thousands of “gen” Web sites. Familysearch.org, the genealogical search engine sponsored by the Church of Latter Day Saints, receives over eight million hits a day; in the first year of its existence, from 1999-2000, the Web site had over three billion visitors.

Beyond the strip malls that littered the outskirts of Maysville, I found the settlement of Washington. It had been established in 1786 in a marsh area, where buffalo herds had carved an ancient corridor to the salt licks. Jeannette Tolle, an older local historian, walked me around the Old Main Street, which was lined with 119 log cabins from the 18th century, and a smattering of limestone buildings. She noted one of the last flatboat houses in America, which had been constructed from the boards of a boat that had floated down the river. Then she pointed out the Marshall Key House. “Harriet Beecher stayed there on weekends,” she said, her soft Kentucky accent reminding me of one of my aunts. “Harriet Beecher, who had not married Mr. Stowe by then; she was a resident of Cincinnati. When she came and stayed and saw slaves sold on the courthouse lawn, she was just enraged.”

Thinking it would be entertaining for his young visitor from Ohio, Marshall Key had escorted Stowe to see a family of slaves on the auction block in 1833. The moment was providential; 20 years later, she based much of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” on that horrific event. One passage from her book recalled that tragic day:

“The woman who had been advertised by the name of Hagar was a regular African in feature and figure. By her side stood her only remaining son, Albert, a bright-looking little fellow of fourteen years. The boy was the only survivor of a large family, who had been successively sold away from her to a southern market. The mother held on to him with both her shaking hands, and eyed with intense trepidation every one who walked up to examine him.”

Jeannette and I spoke about the region’s struggle with its conflicting slave-owning past. Maysville features both the National Underground Railroad Museum and the home of General Albert Sidney, a celebrated Confederate leader who fell at the Battle of Shiloh. As Jeannette pointed out, many local families split over the Civil War, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hosts.

“Marshall Key was a large slave owner and his son-in-law was James Paxton. And James Paxton would hide slaves there at the Paxton Inn. They would hang out a quilt with a star as a sign for the conductors. But Paxton couldn’t handle it, so he moved to Ohio.”

What about my family? I wondered about this silence over four generations. It had always seemed curious to me that our family had left the Southern borderlands right after the Civil War. Our family history begged the question: Had my ancestors split over the Civil War as well? Had they attended the Washington square slave auctions? There was a certain unease about these questions that had haunted my family for years and delayed any deliberate research into our family past; we knew Biggers was a common name for African Americans and former slaves. One distant cousin had warned me: Don’t go digging up ghosts that should remain buried.

I decided to visit the Mason County Museum in Maysville and finally investigate the legacy of my Biggers ancestors. I wasn’t alone; the research library was packed with computer-toting genealogists and curiosity seekers. According to Myra Hardy, the museum librarian, scores of people visit this small library each week, many of whom have traveled across the country. A couple from New Jersey shared a table with me, loaded down with documents and books.

“You’re all looking for your family roots,” Myra told me. There was something decidedly regional in her tone; you displaced northerners are part of the lost southern diaspora, she wanted to say. “You all want to know where you have descended from, and from where you originated. And I try to help people find their way. We look through the census, marriage and death records, cemetery, deeds, wills, court records in general.”

We started with my great-great-grandfather Harvey Biggers, the illusive namesake connecting us to Maysville. Myra piled up the microfilm rolls. She placed four thick volumes onto my table. Within minutes, seeing her head buried into one document, I heard Myra raise her voice.

“I found Harvey listed in the household of 480, which lists all of his children and his wife. He is just down from Garland Biggers, who appears to be his father.” She went back to work. I leafed through the census records. I could hear others chattering behind the rattle of microfilm machines. Several minutes later Myra looked up. “These are the Slave Schedule documents. Garland Biggers had,” she paused for a second, “it looks like three slaves. He had one which was three, which was probably the son of one of his main slaves.”

By the end of the day, framed by mounds of photocopies and documents, I found that our family had been plantation farmers and slave owners since the first pioneers in Maysville. Unlike his father and some of his brothers, though, my great-great-grandfather Harvey had developed a large farm without slaves. By 1862, the family split appeared on the muster rolls. Some of the Biggers brothers enrolled in the Confederate militia, while another brother signed up with the Union forces. At the end of the war, Harvey left his parents and brothers and crossed the Ohio River with his wife and family. Just as he never spoke again of his Kentucky clan, he was never mentioned in his father’s will or subsequent family documents. Our family history had been put to rest in 1865. I suddenly wasn’t sure if I wanted to raise the dead now.

I looked for any Biggers in the area today. There weren’t any. According to the records, the last two surviving male Biggers in the area were both named Charles Biggers; one was white, and one was black and he had been the grandson of an African American slave to one of our distant cousins.

When I crossed back over the Ohio River this time, I wondered what Harvey Biggers was thinking in this same place in 1865, when he had packed up his entire life and left his history behind. Was he so disgusted with his family’s slave-owning past—my family’s past—that he had wanted to burn any proof of its existence? To burn down our family tree, so to speak. And, if that was true,  should I respect his choice to break with our slave-owning past and simply embrace our contemporary family history, as if it had been given birth in 1865? Or, was he simply following our ancestors’ migration patterns to the West, in that continual process of reinventing ourselves?

Traveling certainly provokes questioning of our own sense of place. After Maysville, I felt a haunting sense of confusion, not a whole lot of understanding, about my great-great-grandfather’s crossing and our heritage. It would have been easy to champion Harvey as an anti-slavery advocate in our family, who made the hard decision to walk away from the great American scourge. But the definitive documents were missing to make that judgment.

If anything, the journey allowed me to recognize the hard decisions that lead to the forks in our family traveling. I looked back at the Ohio River this time and realized it was no longer a great divide between the North and South, no faux Mason-Dixon line; it now served as a bridge to my family’s and the region’s past, always there to traverse and investigate.

Heading north, I was ready to make the long journey home.

Tags: Family Travel, Genealogy, North America, United States, Kentucky

Jeff Biggers is the author of several works of travel memoir/history and plays, including the forthcoming "Damnatio Memoriae: A Play, Una Commedia," based on migration stories in ancient Rome.


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