Knitting families together

After spending 20 years digging through historical records and connecting with long-lost kin, Desi L. Campbell traced the roots of his family tree all the way back to his ancestors in Africa.

With an old soul and a thirst for making connections, Campbell is a lifelong learner and a teacher. Born in Washington, D.C., he has planted himself in Lillington where his father grew up and generations of his people made their homes. Through genealogy, Campbell discovered his place in the world and is helping others find their place too.

“I didn’t grow up in Harnett County, but coming here six years ago was the best move I could have made,” he said. “I love that I can go down the street to a cousin’s house just sit on the porch and enjoy good conversation.”

Campbell is a 5th-grade teacher at Lillington-Shawtown Elementary School. He also serves as the executive director of the Harnett County African American Heritage Center and president of the Sandhills Chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society. Sandhills is one of four North Carolina AAHGS chapters, with others in Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh.

The Sandhills chapter is hosting the “Faith, Valor and Learning” North Carolina AAHGS Black History Month Genealogy Conference, a three-day genealogy conference at Fayetteville State University from Jan. 31 to Feb. 2.

In 12 interactive workshops, speakers tell stories and demonstrate methodologies and practical resources related to African American genealogy. Campbell leads workshops teaching participants how to launch their journey into genealogy and build out their family tree.

Getting started

For fledgling genealogists, simply getting started can be daunting and the conference aims to smooth the pathway.

The key is to start small, keep it simple and aim for going back just a couple of generations, advises Wanda Cox-Bailey, a retired librarian who worked with the Wake County Public Library System. She is president of the AAHGS Raleigh Chapter and is one of the conference speakers.

“Start with yourself and list your two parents and if your parents each have two parents, that’s four more and if you go back another generation you get to 16,” she said. “By the time you add aunts and uncles and their other siblings, your family tree grows enormously.”

Campbell realized the breadth of his own family tree’s branches when he embarked on his long journey to find his roots.

With the help of DNA records, Campbell met Deena Hill, a distant relative in Utah, who is white and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Using DNA, wills, obituaries and other records, the two traced their family’s lineage to their 18th-century enslaved ancestors Jennie and Joe McLean and finally to Jennie’s African origins.

Both Campbell and Hill have described the harrowing transatlantic slave trade Jennie’s parents survived when they were brought to Virginia from the Igbo nation in Nigeria.

Jennie was sold to a Harnett County landowner where she united with Joe and had 14 children. Over the years, the family was torn apart as parents and children were sold or passed around among family members.

Last year, Campbell and Hill co-wrote the documentary A Slave Named Jenny about their lives.

Instilling pride

Wanda Cox-Bailey, who has roots in Cumberland County, has traced the maternal side of her family back six generations. She points to genealogy’s power to instill a sense of pride in families, even if they are rooted in humble beginnings.

“You can discover extraordinary details in ordinary lives and learn that your ancestors were resilient and persevered in times of strife and in times of joy,” she said.

For Campbell, tracing his ancestors came naturally, starting with his deep childhood curiosity about his origins.

He grew up spending summers with his maternal grandparents in Spivey’s Corner, a small town in Sampson County, famous for its annual hollering contest that started in 1969 and lasted almost 50 years before ending in 2016.

“I was fortunate that my grandparents and my great-grandparents lived near each other on the same land,” he said. “I could go from house to house visiting them and other relatives and neighbors.”

Campbell’s parents moved from Washington, D.C., to Zebulon, North Carolina, when he was 13 and after graduating from high school in 1987, he enrolled at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte. That’s where his history began to unfold. He met a few of his cousins and started attending family reunions.

At church, he befriended Daisy Humphrey Furbush, who devoted the last 25 years of her life to tracing her family genealogy. A native of Robeson County, she was a member of the Charlotte Chapter of the AAHGS and had distant relatives whose last name was Campbell, the same as Desi Campbell’s. She was eager to take the inquisitive young man under her wing and show him how to trace his ancestors using the popular site Ancestry.com.

“We were tight,” Campbell said. “She treated me like a son and showed me how to build a family tree.”

Humphrey Furbush passed away in 2019.

Navigating historic records

Calling himself “an old folk person” because of his love for elders, Campbell started his genealogy journey talking with and learning from longtime residents of his community who provided pictures, obituaries and other artifacts and paperwork that aided his research.

“Using obituaries, I visited cemeteries and gleaned a lot of information from them,” he said, “and then I’d go to the county and state archives and research records.”

Researching family history in North Carolina can be challenging. The state didn’t keep records of births and deaths before October 1913, although some counties do maintain earlier data.

And U.S. Census records didn’t record African Americans by name prior to 1870, the first census after the Civil War. Before the war, enslaved individuals were listed statistically under the names of those who claimed them as property.

That’s why genealogists turn to Ancestry.com, a subscription-based website with a vast collection of historical records that helps users take a deep dive into their family history. Ancestry.com also has a DNA testing program and for Campbell, that was a game changer.

It was the link connecting Campbell with Deena Hill that led them to reconstruct a family that had been fragmented over 200 years ago and enabled them to share their collective narrative with the world.

“Our journey with DNA opened up a whole new realm of possibility,” Campbell said. “We’ve successfully connected over 300 individuals, all descendants linked to Joe and Jennie McLean.”

Last summer, the clan held a DNA family festival uniting over 150 people from across the nation all related to each other.

For his efforts, Campbell received the North Carolina Genealogical Society’s 2024 Award for Outstanding Contribution to N.C. Genealogy.

Linking the community

At the AAHGS genealogy conference, participants enjoy a daylong tour of Fayetteville’s storied African American Heritage Trail, a collection of 23 sites that provide a historical glimpse into the lives of African Americans who resided in Fayetteville and Cumberland County.

The sites include the grave of Isaac Hammond who served in the 10th N.C. Regiment Continental Line during the Revolutionary War, became a barber in town and participated in politics even though Black people were not permitted to vote at that time.

Evans Metropolitan A.M.E. Zion Church, founded by Henry Evans, is on the route too. A free Black man, he was a traveling shoe cobbler during the late 1700s in North Carolina. He stopped in Fayetteville, felt the call to preach to those enslaved in the area and started the church.

The historic Market House is one of the last stops on the trail. While not built as a slave market, enslaved people were sold there until slavery was abolished in 1865.

These sites have the power to link Cumberland County’s past with its present and genealogical research provides those connections.

Wanda Cox-Bailey views genealogy as a way for individuals to realize a sense of place and belonging. And it has the power to knit communities together.

“Being part of a community instills pride,” she said. “When you search for your ancestors, you discover the depth of your roots and you get a strong sense of who you are.”

One of the most important stories in Cox-Bailey’s family history comes from her father’s side. He served in the military and the family was frequently on the move. But every summer they visited relatives in Cumberland County and brought her grandmother who lived to be almost 100.

She recalls the family always took a long and winding route through Fayetteville to avoid driving past the Market House.

“My grandmother could not stand to see the Market House,” Cox-Bailey said. “She cried every time she saw it because her mother was sold there.”

Cox-Bailey knows that many people have important family stories they tell over and over and pass down through generations.

“The Market House is part of my family’s story,” she said. “And that’s the story I never want to lose.”

For Campbell, who learned his forefathers came from the other side of the world and settled in North Carolina before they were even recognized as individuals, he is pleased that he can share their stories and celebrate their lives.

“It has been thrilling to discover my ancestors’ on long lost wills and on gravestones,” he said. “And I’m grateful that I can actually see their names in print.”

Read CityView Magazine’s “The Love Issue” February 2025 e-edition here.