We're Booker T. Washington's White Relatives: Geneology Reveals Surprises

A number of years ago, my husband started punching names into a family-tree program for both his family and mine. Somewhere down the line, he found a Burroughs who was said to have owned former slave and famed African American educator Booker T. Washington. That really got our attention.

Four or five years ago we took a trip to the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee, where we did some genealogy work. One place we made a point of going was to the Booker T. Washington memorial in Virginia, which was built on the farm of James Burroughs.

We arrived there to find a small family cemetery in front of the main park building. In the cemetery, we found the graves of some of the Burroughs family who had owned the farm. They had also owned Booker T., his mother, brother and sister.

Inside the building, we saw pictures of some of the Burroughs family. The young woman working there said a former employee had done a lot of research on the Burroughs family, and she went to the files and pulled out a folder of information. In it we soon found that the family had a daughter named Ellen America Burroughs. I recognized that name from my husband's information in the family tree program. It was not an easy name to forget.

He went to our vehicle and retrieved a print-out of his research on the Burroughs family and sure enough, there was the entire family, including the same Ellen America. We soon figured out that the owner of the farm and the slaves had been a brother to my husband's great-great grandfather.

That sounds like a long way back, but if my dad, who died in 1997, were still alive, he would be a great-great grandfather many times over. And his brother, whom we still visit in California, would be the same relation to our seven-month-old great-grandson as this slave owner was to my husband.

My father-in-law was the only older member of the Burroughs family I ever knew, and he was the epitome of gentleness and kindness. It was hard to picture relatives of his having owned slaves. Needless to say, neither of us was happy about having slave owners in the family background.