Families

Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely

Posted on December 9, 2022 by -

Peggy Preacely, a writer, filmmaker, and public health worker, learned her family history from her mother, Ellen Craft Dammond, the “griot of the family,” who recognized that “there were wonderful stories that needed to be kept alive in the family.” Her mother was a niece of William Monroe Trotter as well as a descendant of the famous fugitive slaves William and Ellen Craft. 

Mother and daughter both participated in the civil rights movement. Ellen Dammond worked with Dorothy Height and Polly Cowan in the Wednesdays in Mississippi initiative. Peggy Preacely, who sees herself as carrying on a double family line of “freedom fighters,” joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was jailed for sit-ins in the south. As she said, “I had to do something in my lifetime to make a difference because Uncle Monroe did and the Crafts escaped from slavery.”

Diana Redman

Posted on December 9, 2022 by -

Diana Redman graduated from Ohio State University and works in the Ohio Department of Human Services. After she won a Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest in high school, her grandmother Ida Mae Young Redman told her of her connection to Thomas Jefferson. She has a love of history, especially about the lives and contributions of “everyday” people, and is proud of her family: “Whatever you want to do, the family is here to support and help you accomplish what you want.”

Andrew Jackson Roberts

Posted on December 9, 2022 by -

Andrew J. Roberts was the son of Giles and Nancy Roberts, who moved from Mecklenburg County, VA, to rural Ross County, OH, soon after his birth.  The Robertses were neighbors of Madison Hemings and his family.  A. J. Roberts attended Wilberforce and Oberlin colleges and taught school for fourteen years in Ohio and Tennessee.  In 1878 he married Ellen Hemings.  Nine years later, with two young children (Frederick and Estelle), they left their home and families in Ross County to settle in Los Angeles. 

Working first as a drayman, A. J. Roberts and a friend soon built up what became the Los Angeles Van, Truck and Storage Company.  In the early 1900s Roberts opened the first black-owned mortuary in Los Angeles, in which his sons Frederick M. Roberts  and William Giles Roberts were also associated.  He was a founder of Tabernacle Baptist Church, was active in the National Urban League, and was described in an obituary as “one of California’s most progressive pioneer citizens.”

Ann Pettiford Medley

Posted on December 9, 2022 by -

Ann Pettiford Medley grew up in Greenfield, Ohio.  She and her husband, Cecil Medley, raised five children and worked in the catering and food services field.  It was her daughter Patti Jo Harding who began to research the family history and enlisted the help of her cousin Diana Redman and Getting Word consultant Beverly Gray.  Mother and daughter were present at Getting Word’s first interview in Chillicothe in 1993.  Ann Medley remembers Sunday visits to her grandmother Anna Young Pettiford, some of whose siblings passed into the white world, cutting ties with the family.

Mabel Hall Middleton

Posted on December 9, 2022 by -

Mabel Hall Pittman Middleton, writer and teacher, grew up in Lexington, Virginia. After serving in the Women’s Army Corps in World War II and graduating from Fisk University, she taught English in Mississippi. She obtained her doctorate from Southern Illinois University and chaired the English Department at Jackson State University. She was appointed to the Mississippi Humanities Council in 2000.

Dr. Middleton, who married and had three children, heard from her family of her connection to Monticello but did not hear of her ancestor Brown Colbert’s emigration to Liberia.

Janie Trent Mosley

Posted on December 9, 2022 by -

The Trent sisters—Janie Mosley, Omega Calimese, and Bertha Harmon—are descended from Betsy Hemmings through both their maternal and paternal lines.  They heard the history of their connection to Monticello from their aunt Lucy Ann Trent, who was a teacher.  Their grandparents, who purchased a Buckingham County farm in freedom, lost two of their sons in a West Virginia mine accident at the end of the nineteenth century.  As Bertha Harmon said, they have a “strong willed, hard working, loving family,” a family that has always tried “to do the right thing, to try to help people that needed help and strive for the best.

Zeta Brown Nichols

Posted on December 9, 2022 by -

Zeta Brown Nichols grew up in Keswick, just east of Charlottesville. She shared memories of life in the area in the 1940s and 50s. Like many others in the Hern family, she became a teacher, initially in a one-room schoolhouse in western Albemarle County and later at Albemarle Training School. She learned of her connection to Monticello from her aunt Martha Hearns Boston, also a teacher.