Every good family history mystery begins with chasing shadows. Flitting from one dark corner to the next, peering through the darkness with the light of research and genetic genealogy, most corners turn out to be empty, but sometimes in the inky blackness, you perceive a presence. Someone is staring back at you from beyond the veil. On the Dallas, Texas death certificate of my 3rd great-grandfather John Bobo, Cornelius and Emma are noted as his parents, information given by his daughter-in-law, and my great-great grandmother Bessie Fredonia Demmings-Bobo.
Bessie knew her father-in-law was also probably born in Mississippi even though John spent most of his life in East Texas, first in the rough and tumble prairie town of Navasota on the banks of the Rio Brazos, before violent racial terror drove his family to Dallas in Almost certainly enslaved, I have finally uncovered the story of their lives in the dark past of an enslaver who I discovered was also my ancestor, and in the fertile river floodplains of the Mississippi River, on the Natchez Trace and rolling cotton fields of Bastrop, Louisiana.
John Bobo, my 3x great-grandfather is actually quite well-documented during Reconstruction after the Civil War, and into the early 19th century.
He appears in newspaper articles, tax rolls John was a property owner between β in Navasota and later Dallas , census documents, and voter registrations, but his parents Cornelius and Emma are decidedly not. And my living relatives have no knowledge of them either. Years of research in state archives and historical databases have not produced a single record for either of them.
Bessie guessed he was 60 years old when he died, but differing records show he could have easily been 10 years older than that or more. If they can trace their roots far enough, African American families often lose their ancestors in records before emancipation in It can be enormously frustrating to see your ancestors literally disappear in front of your eyes as the census records fade and Black people are reduced to hash marks or names with dollar figures next to them signifying their value in the inventories of dead enslavers.
