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Dear Editor,

I'm searching for my birth father who robbed a gas station in 1964 in San Bernardino, CA.~~~~~Lee Turnquist

Dear Lee,

Have you tried writing or calling the local newspaper in that area to get a copy of the article of the robbery? That sort of thing was big deal back in 1964, the crime rate was fairly low.

Carol

Editor, Genealogy Forum News

I adopted my son out on 9/12/64 in a hospital in Lancaster, California. Due to threats and lies or loose my other children I had no choice. I named my son Tobey Smith he was case number NW-3030. I went through lawyers legal aid association and bureau of adoptions. I signed the papers in the hospital through my lawyer. She brought me a bottle of perfume. I guess that was my trade off for my son. She promised me when he turned 18 that we could have each others addresses, when I wrote to her then she refused, another lie. I have put his name in this computer and date of birth every place I have found a place to put it. The night he was born they refused to let me see him or hold him, and I snuck down to the nursery that night to see him and he was gone. I guess they hid him form me. My name at the time of his birth was Kathryn A. Sei. I moved from California to Texas, was there three years when I got a letter from David Lynch an adoption worker on July 8, 1966 that he was putting a warrant out for my arrest for desertion. Again more lies because they knew where I was and my lawyer had written to me advising me not to get remarried until my divorce from Sei was final. This was another lie. I signed the papers again figuring this time I couldn't have taken him away from his life at three years old. He has never been out of our hearts and our prayers. My other son named his son Tobey, for the son I lost. It didn't help much but it's kept a beautiful reminder of him. If any body out there can help me find my son It would be greatly appreciated. We need our family back together. Thank you regardless.

Kathryn Bennett

My E-mail----NANNY4-8@MSN.COM

 

Hello, Carol --

Is there ever a chat room or schedule for people who have roots in Asia or the Pacific? I am very hesitant to buy expensive software, etc. claiming 1 billion names unless someone could advise me if there are Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Indians, Guamanians, Maori, Tahitians, Samoans, etc.

There are lots of us out here wanting good direction. Some of us are stuck regarding our European roots too, i.e., from Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, the Netherlands unless we have any leads regarding Asia and the Pacific. I have roots from the Philippines, to include Spain, Italy, France, and India. I need to find out how all this "blood" connected.

Please include Asia and the Pacific to your chatroom schedules. Please let me know when it will be, or if you have any clues as to where I should turn in my "hunt". Thank you very much.

Respectfully,

Gina :>)

GQFan@aol.com

 

I have been searching my ancestory. My name is Clara Mackey. My maiden name is Clara Mae Quarles. I live in Hobbs, NM. My cousin has been searching for our ancestory also. He made a startling discovery. We the Quarles with major roots in Oklahoma and Kansas and Virginia among other places, are from the same lineage of Quarles as Langston Hughes.

Langston Hughes was given everything by his plantation owner father Ralph Quarles except his name of Quarles. He even gave them the house, best education and freed his mother from being a slave. His mother had kinship to Pocahantas.

I have been unable to find out much about my mom's side of the family the Burist's, yet this startling discovery about my dad's side of the family is amazing.

I cannot say we are blood kin without more research, yet we have a lot in common. We definitely came from the same plantation and the Quarles name that my family tree has is the same as Ralph Quarles. Langston Hughes white father. http://www.genealogyforum.rootsweb.com/gfaol/

Name: Charles Langston
Birthplace: Louisa Co. VA
Status: Born a Slave. Freed in 1834
Occupation/Training: Educator Reformer
Residence: Louisa Co. VA, Oberlin Ohio, Chillicothe Ohio, Columbus Ohio, Lawrence Kansas

Abolitionist Involvement: Given his freedom papers in 1834, Charles Langston had already received some basic education from his father, plantation owner Quarles. He enrolled with his brother Gideon at Oberlin College. He became a teacher and then attended Oberlin again from 1841-1844. He established a school for Negro children in Ohio, and worked for the repeal of the Ohio Black Laws. He narrowly escaped death when he and Martin Delaney were attacked by a white mob who had threatened to kill them both. As an educator he later became principal of the Columbus Colored Schools in 1856. Like his close friend David Jenkins, he came a leader in the Masonic organizations in Ohio, also. Around that time, he became involved in the abolitionist movement in Ohio. He was involved in both the anti-slavery society, and the Underground Railroad. He along with George B. Vashon, and Charles L Reason suggested the establishment of an institution for Negroes. Although the response was as first sparse at best, Wilberforce Ohio came to be established in 1856. He became well known after he was involved in the rescue of a fugitive slave in 1858. During the Civil War, he helped to recruit soldiers for the Union army. He married Mary Sampson Leary, a widow of one of the men killed at Harper's Ferry with John Brown. Their daughter became the mother of literary great Langston Hughes. He moved to Kansas after the war, and continued his involvement for the rights of Negroes in education, the legal system, and politically. He died in 1892 at the age of 73.

Family: Son of Capt. Ralph Quarles, Plantation Owner. Lucy Langston--mother.

Brothers---Gideon Quarles Langston John Mercer Langston. Sister--Maria Langston. Grandson--Langston Hughes. Half siblings--William, Harriet and Mary Langston.

Place of Death: Lawrence Kansas

Publications: From Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol; Minutes of the State Conventions of Colored Citizens of Ohio; Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Convention: 1830-1864 ed. by Howard H. Bell

"What happens to a dream deferred?" Langston Hughes once wrote:

Langston Hughes devoted most of his life and poetic genius to the realization of that dream deferred, the dream of racial equality. It was a dream that pervades most of his writings—his poetry, plays, short stories, novels, autobiographies, children's books, newspaper columns, Negro histories, edited anthologies, and other works. It was a dream that brought him literary fame. In the later years of his life, he was regarded by various American admirers as the "O. Henry of Harlem," the "Dean of Negro Writers in America," and the "Negro Poet Laureate." His fame abroad was no less remarkable; collections of his poems were translated into such languages as German, French, Japanese, Danish, Gujarati, Czechoslovakian, Spanish, Hindi, Italian, Polish, Swedish, and Portuguese. M. Bekker wrote in the introduction to a Russian edition of Hughes's poetry:

The poetry of Langston Hughes is simple and beautiful, like life itself. On whatever subject the poet writes—love and tenderness, degradation and violence, joblessness and the Lynch law, anger and the struggle for freedom, —his poems are always imbued with the people's sorrows and joys. For this reason his poems go unfailingly to the heart of the common man, be he black or white, American or Russian.

As Hughes stated in 1965, "Many Americans seem to have the idea that art has very little to do with life, you know, and poetry has even less to do with life than other forms of art. Well, I don't think that's true at all." Perhaps the reason his poetry is so moving is that it reflects so much of his own life. It poignantly relates his own personal experiences with racism, poverty, and loneliness. These were experiences which Hughes first encountered not in New York City, where he died in 1967, nor in Cleveland, where he attended high school, but in Kansas, where he spent most of his childhood.

Langston Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Mo., yet from 1903 to 1915 lived primarily in Lawrence. As he told a Lawrence audience several years before his death, "I sort of claim to be a Kansan because my whole childhood was spent here in Lawrence and Topeka, and sometimes in Kansas City." In fact, he said:

The first place I remember is Lawrence, right here. And the specific street I remember is Alabama Street. And then we moved north, we moved to New York Street shortly thereafter. The first church I remember is the A. M. E. Church on the corner of Ninth, I guess it is, and New York. That is where I went to Sunday School, where I almost became converted, which I tell about in The Big Sea, my autobiography, my first autobiography.

Langston Hughes was profoundly affected not only by his childhood memories of Lawrence, but also by the extremely significant influence of his Kansas family. His maternal grandfather, Charles H. Langston, first came to Kansas in 1862, settled in Lawrence in the 1880's, and died there in 1892. Hughes's mother, Carrie Mercer Langston, was born on a farm near Lakeview, Kan., and spent much of her youth in Lawrence. Until he was 12 years old, Langston Hughes lived in Lawrence with his grandmother, Mary Langston. Certainly, the Langstons were a most remarkable black family in American history. All of them ardently believed in the value of education. All championed the dream of racial equality. And in their own way, all fought for freedom. This was a rich family tradition not lost on their best known descendant, Langston Hughes.

Yet to fully understand how the Langston heritage influenced Langston Hughes, one must go back to the beginning, as Hughes himself did in his first autobiography, The Big Sea. Langston's maternal great-grandfather was Ralph Quarles, the white owner of a large plantation in Louisa county, Virginia. On an unknown date, Quarles accepted a slave, Lucy Langston, as collateral for an unspecified loan. One of Lucy's sons wrote of her background:

Her surname was of Indian origin, and borne by her mother, as she came out of a tribe of Indians of close relationships in blood to the famous Pocahontas. Of Indian extraction, she was possessed of slight proportion of Negro blood; and yet, she and her mother, a full-blooded Indian woman, who was brought upon the plantation and remained there up to her death, were loved and honored by their fellow-slaves of every class.

Since Quarles's creditor never paid the debt, Lucy became the planter's own slave, and sometime thereafter gave birth to his daughter, Maria. In 1806 Quarles emancipated both mother and child. Lucy subsequently bore him three sons: Gideon (1809), Charles (1817), and John (1829). Because of Virginia's antimiscegenation laws, Quarles's children were given their mother's surname. Nonetheless, Ralph Quarles treated Lucy Langston and his mulatto children with much consideration. As we already noted, he emancipated Lucy and their daughter in 1806. Furthermore, it was Quarles who gave the two oldest boys their early schooling. John recounted how his father, a man with "a love of learning and culture," provided brother Charles with a "thorough English education." In view of Quarles's keen interest in his sons' intellectual development, it is not surprising that after his death they continued with their schooling.

In 1834 Quarles and Lucy Langston died and, as he requested, were buried next to each other on his Virginia plantation. In his last will and testament, Ralph Quarles recognized Gideon, Charles, and John Langston as his only heirs. The sons entrusted the sale of the plantation to the executors of their father's will, and left Virginia for the free state of Ohio. The Langston brothers first moved to Chillicothe, and then to Oberlin, Ohio, where Gideon and Charles enrolled at Oberlin College. Unfortunately, little is known of Gideon Langston's life after he left Virginia. John Mercer Langston, however, became one of the most prominent Negroes in America. He was the first black man to enter a theological school in the United States, as well as the first Negro to enter an American law school. John Mercer Langston founded the law school at Howard University in 1868, was appointed American minister to Haiti in 1877, was named president of the Virginia Normal Institute at Petersburg in 1885, and was elected a United States congressman from Virginia's Fourth congressional district in 1888. Appropriately, Congressman Langston served on the house committee on education.

Yet of the three Langston brothers, we are primarily concerned with Charles, Langston Hughes's grandfather. Charles was born on August 31, 1817, in Fredericksburg, Va. Growing up on his father's Louisa county plantation, he received not only a "thorough English education," but also learned farming. Remembering Charles as an intelligent boy with a rebellious temperament, John Mercer Langston recalled:

He was not large nor apparently firm of body; but well endowed intellectually. His disposition and temper though ordinarily well controlled, were not naturally of the easy and even sort. In his constitution, he was impetuous and aggressive; and under discipline and opposition, he was always restive, yet, he yielded with reasonable docility and obedience to the training to which his father, interested in his education, sought to subject him.

After the move to Oberlin in 1834, the 15 year-old Charles Langston enrolled in the preparatory department of Oberlin College, thereby becoming one of the first Negro men to attend that institution. Charles was a student in the preparatory department from 1834 to 1835 and again in 1841 until 1844.(11) According to his brother John, Charles "knew the value of education and how much depended in life upon sustaining and directing rather than opposing and crossing the natural inclination, the moral trend of a young person.

What precisely Charles Langston did the entire time he lived in Ohio is not known. He taught school there for eight years. Perhaps he also farmed. Census data suggest that he was married in Ohio, where his wife gave birth to a son, Desalines W. Langston, in 1857 or 1858. By the time this son was born, Charles had become actively involved in operating the Oberlin station of the underground railway. Indeed, he figured prominently in the Oberlin-Wellington rescue of September 13, 1858. Along with Simeon Bushnell, he was found guilty of inciting an Oberlin mob to rescue fugitive slave John Price from a kidnapping attempt. At his trial, Charles Langston delivered an eloquent speech condemning the fugitive slave law, a speech which influenced the eventual reversal of his conviction.

After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Charles went to Quincy, Ill., where he recruited Negro soldiers for two Massachusetts regiments (the 54th and 55th). For whatever reason, perhaps age, Langston himself did not enlist. In 1862, he moved to Leavenworth, where he lived until 1868. During his first three years in Leavenworth, he was a schoolteacher. As one history of Kansas reported, "Mr. Langston taught the first colored public school in Kansas, and was Principal of the only colored normal school established in this State." In his remaining two years in the town, he was a grocer.

Charles left Kansas in 1868, returned to Ohio, and on January 18, 1869, married Mary Patterson Leary in Elyria. Mary Langston was Langston Hughes's grandmother, one of the most significant single influences on the poet's life. She was born in 1836 or 1837 in Fayetteville, N. C., where her father, James Patterson, was a stone mason. Langston Hughes noted that before the Civil War Patterson, a free Negro, had encouraged his slave apprentices to buy their way out of slavery. "Once they had worked out their purchase," Hughes stated, "he could see that they reached the North, where there was no slavery."Like her parents, Mary Patterson was also a free Negro. Langston explained:

On my maternal grandmother's side [of the family], there was French and Indian blood. My grandmother looked like an Indian—with very long black hair. She said she could lay claim to Indian land, but that she never wanted the government (or anybody else) to give her anything. She said there had been a French trader who came down the St. Lawrence, then on foot to the Carolinas, and mated with her grandmother, who was a Cherokee so all her people were free. During slavery, she [Mary] had free papers in North Carolina, and traveled about free, at will.

Clara (CLAIRZ505@aol.com)

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