When results of a genetic test sent Darius Brown searching for his family’s African origin, he found ancestors who witnessed significant events in American history.
Brown’s 8th generation maternal grandfather, Fortune, was the personal servant during the Revolutionary War for American Brig. Gen. Charles Coatesworth Pinckney, who eventually signed the U.S. Constitution. Fortune was captured with Pinckney in 1780 in the British siege of Charleston.
Brown’s 4th generation maternal grandfather, Luke Wright, and his 3rd generation paternal grandfather, Isaiah Brown, served together with the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops, Company D, on Morris and James islands after Confederates repulsed two Union assaults on Fort Wagner in the summer of 1863.
These are some of the stories Brown details in his recently released book, At the Feet of the Elders: A Journey into a Lowcountry Family History. Brown has meticulously traced several lines of his family from the colonial period until the mid-1900s.
This six-year journey into his family’s history began after a DNA test in 2017 showed that he was 98% African. “I went on a quest to find out where in Africa my family came from,” said Brown, a research assistant and genealogist at the International African American Museum in Charleston.
With more than six years of experience in genealogy research with an emphasis on enslaved African Americans in the Lowcountry, Brown used archival records, genetic genealogy and oral histories to retrieve details about his family’s history.
A family’s African origin
Brown reconstructed the story of his free and enslaved ancestors who toiled on plantations in Beaufort, Charleston and Colleton counties. Through plantation records, Civil War pension files and military records, census data, Freedmen’s Bureau bank accounts, and birth and death certificates Brown found more than 100 ancestors.
“I started researching every line in my family as far back as possible, hoping I could find that ancestor who was brought here from Africa,” he said. Brown said his ancestors were likely taken from Senegal and Sierra Leone.
He has uncovered ancestors, including some who were born in Africa. A Muslim man named Musa was likely one of them.
Brown’s great-grandmother, Margaret Jiles Brown of Beaufort, spoke of an ancestor named Musa. Through his research of slave ship records, Brown believes Musa may have been among the captives that Daniel Blake, owner of a plantation on the Combahee River, may have purchased in the mid-1750s from a shipment of people from The Gambia or Sierra Leone.
A date to remember
Among the stream of dates in his book, Brown hopes the book’s readers retain 1861, the year that enslaved Africans at Port Royal gained their freedom two years before the Emancipation Proclamation.
Seven months after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861 to trigger the Civil War, Union troops seized Port Royal Sound near Beaufort. With the Union’s takeover of Port Royal, plantation owners fled, leaving behind thousands of formerly enslaved people, including many of Brown’s ancestors.
London Brown, Brown’s 4th generation paternal grandfather, and his wife, Daphne, had been enslaved on the Combahee River in 1843 before their enslaver, Arthur Blake, moved them and hundreds of other people he owned to his plantation on the South Santee River near McClellanville. On Brown’s maternal side, he’s also related to Friday and Eliza Blake, his 5th generation grandparents, who were enslaved on the same plantation.
Brown speculates that the exodus of enslaved people from the Combahee in Colleton County to the Santee Delta possibly puts him in the family lineage of Robert Blake, a formerly enslaved man who won the nation’s highest military honor.
Blake was among 81 enslaved men from the South Santee who entered the Union Navy, Brown said. However, it was Blake’s heroism on Johns Island during a Confederate attack on Christmas Day 1863 onboard the Union gunboat Marblehead that earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Brown said he was surprised to discover that at least 24 of his direct relatives fought with the Union during the Civil War. “It showed me they weren’t concerned about their own freedom but the freedom of others,” he said. “It gives me a sense of pride, but I still recognize the country viewed them in a negative light.”
Brown wrote: “Men who were once rejected and looked down on as the scum of the earth helped to pull the Union through with a victory.”
Brown’s relatives have a family reunion tradition at the Grays Hill community in Beaufort. It is an annual summertime event that draws the Browns and Smalls from the Carolinas, Texas, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
At the last reunion this summer, Brown shared his research with his relatives who were in awe of his finding and stressed it is worthy of passing to the next generation.
“I hope the next generation of my family will realize they descend from strong and resilient people,” he said. “For other families, maybe my research may inspire them to do the same to find their ancestors.
“A lot of people are coming in to learn about their family roots,” he said. “Twice a day at the museum we do a presentation on how to research your family, and we can do consultations to help [a family] get past those brick walls.”
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