Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City Read Online Free PDF Page B

documents pertaining to my family; and second, that despite the lapses of my parents’ generation, there had been a powerful impulse to memorialize New York’s black history, embodied in Arthur Schomburg and his collection. What gave me the courage to pursue my quest was my early discovery of the scrapbook pages containing the obituaries of Peter Guignon and Philip White. The
New York Freeman
and
Age
, I realized, had cared enough about these two men to memorialize them in print; an individual, still unknown to me, had cared enough to create scrapbook pages commemorating their lives and deaths; historian Rhoda Freeman had cared enough to preserve these pages in her research collection; and the Schomburg Center had cared enough to house her collection in its archives.
The Harry Albro Williamson Papers
     
    At the Schomburg, I found an even more valuable cache, the Harry Albro Williamson Papers, preserved on a number of microfilm reels, which I’d been told was one of the few nineteenth-century family collections held at the center. I had no idea who Williamson was or who his family might be, but I started systematically working my way through his papers. Born in New York in 1875, Williamson seems to have dedicated his entire life to freemasonry, amassing volumes of material to compile a comprehensive history of black lodges in the United States. But Williamson was also interested in family history, and in plowing through his genealogical notes I made a serendipitous discovery just as astonishing as the earlier obituaries. Neatly typed on a piece of paper was the following line: “Rebecca was married to Peter Guignon in 1840; she was his first wife.” When least expected, I had found one morelink to my family! Rebecca was none other than the Miss Marshall who Alexander Crummell had named in the obituary of his old friend. Her parents were Joseph and Elizabeth Marshall. The Marshalls had an older daughter, Mary Joseph, who married Albro Lyons, also in 1840. One of the Lyons’s daughters married William Edward Williamson, and Harry was their son. If you’re still with me, Harry Albro Williamson is my grand-uncle.

    Double ambrotype portrait of Albro Lyons Sr. and Mary Joseph Lyons, circa 1860, by an anonymous photographer (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library)
     
    It was clear to me that Williamson was determined to preserve as much of his family history as possible. He compiled genealogical lists. He jotted family stories he had heard down on paper, beginning with comments like “I often listened to the story of how” or “I can recall my grandfather telling me.” He put together a nine-page typed document titled “Folks in Old New York and Brooklyn” in which he explicitly warned of the dangers of historical forgetting: “The various items which shall follow are intended for the present generation (1953) of citizens of color who have little or no knowledge pertaining to members oftheir race whose identities have now completely disappeared from local records because the old have been replaced by the new.” 11
    In Williamson’s papers I uncovered an even more telling example of the will to record the history of nineteenth-century black New Yorkers in a memoir written by another daughter of Albro and Mary Joseph Lyons, Maritcha Lyons (Williamson’s aunt and hence my great-grand-aunt). Born in 1848, Maritcha composed her memoir for publication in the late 1920s but died before completing a final draft. In reading through it, I was amazed at how deep the commitment to preserve family and community history ran in the Lyons family. In her introduction Maritcha noted that her father had hoped to write a book about his life and times but never got further than the title, “The Gentlemen in Black.” Given that he had been one of Peter Guignon’s schoolmates at the old Mulberry Street School and later his brother-in-law, I can only lament that