{"id":32611,"date":"2013-07-29T01:20:53","date_gmt":"2013-07-29T01:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=32611"},"modified":"2013-07-29T02:35:11","modified_gmt":"2013-07-29T02:35:11","slug":"they-wouldn%e2%80%99t-allow-us-to-use-daddy%e2%80%99s-last-name-a-family-historian%e2%80%99s-curiosity-leads-to-revolutionary-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=32611","title":{"rendered":"They Wouldn\u2019t Allow Us to Use Daddy\u2019s Last Name: A Family Historian\u2019s Curiosity Leads to Revolutionary Results"},"content":{"rendered":"

They Wouldn\u2019t Allow Us to Use Daddy\u2019s Last Name: A Family Historian\u2019s Curiosity Leads to Revolutionary Results<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Bayou Talk Newspaper<\/a>
\nVolume 25, Number 7 (July 2013<\/a>)
\npages 1-8<\/p>\n

Anita R. Paul<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most family history researchers know that surnames are an important key to finding ancestors. They also know that names can often lead to dead ends due to misspellings and other misinformation.<\/strong> For Michael N. Henderson<\/a>, a retired Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy, the spelling of a family surname sparked his curiosity and eventually led to a nearly 30-year journey to uncover a hidden truth about his Louisiana roots.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt all began when I was a kid,\u201d recalls Henderson, a native of Algiers<\/a>\u2014a neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana\u2014who now lives near Atlanta, Georgia. \u201cI asked my mom why her mother\u2019s maiden name was spelled Mathieu instead of Matthew.\u201d She credited it to the family being Louisiana Creole and simply chose to spell the surname that way. Fortunately for Henderson, that answer did not satisfy him, so he sought a more suitable explanation.<\/strong> In the midst of his searching, which became a hobby and eventually an obsession during much of his naval career, he uncovered one fact after another about his family\u2019s history and soon became the family historian, a role that did not always meet with genuine excitement from his relatives.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you start digging into the past, some family members get nervous. They\u2019re afraid you might uncover some deep, dark secret that\u2019s been buried for generations,\u201d Henderson explains. Others, mostly those of the younger generation, simply shrugged off Henderson\u2019s many attempts to share his findings. \u201cMy nieces and nephews have never been keen on listening to my ancestral stories, except, of course, when the time came for a school project.\u201d<\/p>\n

As his genealogy research continued, a conversation with a distant cousin opened a genealogical can of worms that caused Henderson to delve deeply into the unique three-tiered social structure of French and Spanish colonial Louisiana. He studied the Code Noir<\/a><\/em> (Black Code) that regulated relationships between Europeans, Native American and African enslaved people, and the distinct class of free people of color…<\/p>\n

…Uncovering this relationship revealed the answer to a haunting statement that had been in Henderson\u2019s family for generations: \u201cThey wouldn\u2019t allow us to use Daddy\u2019s last name.\u201d As Henderson discovered, Agnes assumed the first name of her French consort, Mathieu, as her own surname and passed it on to their mixed-race children and the generations following. This answered the question about the spelling of Henderson\u2019s maternal grandmother\u2019s surname and consequently exposed the answer to the generations-long lament about not being able to use \u201cDaddy\u2019s last name.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They Wouldn\u2019t Allow Us to Use Daddy\u2019s Last Name: A Family Historian\u2019s Curiosity Leads to Revolutionary Results Bayou Talk Newspaper Volume 25, Number 7 (July 2013) pages 1-8 Anita R. Paul Most family history researchers know that surnames are an important key to finding ancestors. They also know that names can often lead to dead […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,369,8,20],"tags":[15310,15311,15309],"class_list":["post-32611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-louisiana","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-anita-r-paul","tag-bayou-talk-newspaper","tag-michael-n-henderson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32611\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}