Details are really moving along and I'm going to be adding posts more frequently to help let everyone know how all aspects of the homecoming areprogressing. In addition to focusing on event details, keeping the family research moving forward is something I really enjoy.
Ancestry.com has bee an excellent tool for researching the family. They continue to add more and more records so something I searched for 6 months ago may be in their databases now. I've been able to find census, military and birth-death records for many of James S. Tyler's children. I found his Civil war pension record as well as listings in Columbus, Oh directories that showed several of his positions such as cook, watchman and clerk. Many of his sons worked as porters at one time or another. James A, who was the doctor showed up as a porter in the 1880 census. Ralph W. shows up in the 1880 census as a grocer.
AnnMcAfee, James S. Tylers mother-in-law shows up in the 1850,1860 and 1870 census as a widow, so I'm still not certain when her husband, William Logan McAfee died. Did you realize that James S. Tylers mother as well as mother in-law were names Ann?
Another question is confirmation that Mariah (James S. Tyler's wife) had a sister names Clara who appears to have married her husband's brother William H. Tyler. Also living in Oberlin around the turn of the century were Mariah's daughter Ethel, who eventually married a Taborn (So did cousin Jeannette, she'll have to fill us in on the relation) and her son Jesse Gerald who was the first African American graduate of the Oberlin Music Conservatory in 1904.
It seems that Clara and William H. had several children who died either at birth or early in childhood according to birial records from Greenlawn Cemetary. One son appears to have lived to adulthood, William H. Tyler Jr. who seemed to have lived with his Uncle James. He shows up on the 1880 census as "nephew".
The Tyler's family home was located at 1107 Highland and all 12 children were born there. Census records also indicate the family having lived at 25 Highland as well. Interesting is that in all the articles written about family members they reference that they lived in a "brick home". That must have been a big deal for colored folk to live in a brick home.
The most interesting discovery of late was made over the weekend in relation to Britton Green. It is known fact that James Seneca's family came from Dinwiddie County Virginia. Britton Green was James S. Tyler's Grandfather. According to an article written in 1902, Britton and Sylvia Green along with their daughter Ann and her husband Walter Tyler were manumitted from slaverly sometime in 1837, possibly even in September and traveled to Columbus Ohio that month. Ann apparently was 9-moths pregnant during their journey as she gave birth to James Seneca Tyler on Oct. 13, 1837.
By chance I did a search for Britton Green and discovered him in the 1830 census in Dinwiddie County Virginia!!!!!!! What was fascinating and intriguing at the same time is that for him to be included in the census, he had to have been a free person of color. So was he free and Walter was still a slave? Oral history and included in an article about James S. later in life is that his father served in the Mexican War of 1846-1848. So he had to have been free too. Maybe it was Britton wh owas manumitted sometime earlier and they thy decided to leave. The only problem was that Virginia law at the time stipulated that all recently manumitted slaves had 30 days to leave the state after their manumission or they risked being returnd to slavery.
I have an made initial contact with the Historical Society of Dinwiddie as well as the county recorder of deeds and hope to gather more information on their manumission and find out who owned them.
Uncle Paul's family tree traces the McAfees back to a Dinah Henderson born in 1763. Accounts of William Logan McAfee state that he was from Virginia and was a "very bright mulatto". I was asked by a co-worker what mulatto meant. It was a common word for mixed race Americans taken from Mule, for hybrid. Several family members were listed as "mulatto" even in the census including Ralph W. Tyler, Mariah Tyler and James Adolph Tyler.
My ultimate goal is to discover our first ancestor who arrived in America. It boggles my mind that we have ancestors that were free as early as 1830. Something to think about......
1 comment:
I am a professor of journalism and a journalism historian at Loyola University New Orleans who became interested in Ralph W. Tyler several years ago, and I have just recently published an article on Ralph W. Tyler as war correspondent in Journalism History: "Ralph W. Tyler: The Unknown Correspondent of World War I." I based it on materials in the Myers papers of the Ohio Historical Society, Tyler's war correspondence,and materials in War Dept. and Army files in the National Archives and in Emmet Scott's papers at Morgan State University.
Here is my conclusion:
When he looked back on the experience, it was with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he wrote to his friend Myers, it was “wonderful”; had he known what he would have to face in France, however, he would not have gone through it “for a fortune.” He had “passed through some hair-raising ordeals—had shells flying about me. . . . Got a lacerated hand; got run over by a truck, lost my eyeglasses, trunk and a number of other things, including several hundred dollars in money, the latter being lost in the last drive of the war—the drive on Metz. Lucky, at that time, I did not lose my life.” He also faced the obstacles, already noted, that military commanders put in his way because of his race. Yet, all told, he confessed to Myers that he was satisfied: “I believe I have rendered the boys . . . a distinct service. They will tell you I have.”
His job was all the more difficult—and all the more laudable—because of the balance he had to maintain between his responsibilities to the government and those to press and public. As Baker, Creel and Scott had wanted, he managed to provide stories that,
as Scott concluded, “unquestionably had a tremendously valuable effect in bringing truth about conditions in France to the colored people of America” and, thus, had helped to keep “high morale among the Negro people of the United States.” He had served the black press well, too, as shown by what Scott called “the splendid prominence which has been given your articles.”
How his readers, the black population, regarded his work is impossible to say without their direct testimony. One hint, however, is provided by the widespread use editors made of his stories, even if the picture he drew was necessarily incomplete and even when the dispatches arrived weeks after the events they described (most, in fact, after the Armistice). Another is the rush of audiences to fill auditoriums to hear him speak on his return—when he could be forthright in describing the discrimination to which the black troops had been subjected. Both should have satisfied him that he had rendered his readers on the home front a distinct service, too: he had fulfilled their need to know, from one of their own, about the contributions their black Yanks made “over there.”
I would be bappy to provide a copy of the article for distribution among Tyler family members and other interested individuals.
Larry Lorenz
lorenz@loyno.edu
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