DNA, Home Remedies, and Customs

This is a picture of my grandmother's maternal grandmother, Clara Inda EVANS ACORD. She went by the name "Indie". In this picture she is about 26 years old. 

Her parents Josiah EVANS and Jane CONNER were some of the early pioneers of NE Johnson County, Arkansas, and they started the little backwoods cemetery known as Evans Cemetery. It sits on a little level area on the side of a mountain  above the Little Mulberry Creek.

Family tradition has always been that Jane's mother, Effie, was Native and her last name was BULL (a few researchers say CHRYST) The only records Effie can be found in are the 1850 & 1860 census in Greene and Webster counties, in Missouri. There are no marriage records. No one can be certain who her parents were. In census records she gives her birth state as North Carolina and says she was born around 1794/5. 

While I may not be able to prove parentage, I'm starting to feel confident about heritage. 

Several years ago, I tested my DNA with 23andMe and noticed that I had trace amounts of "Indigenous American" and "Broadly Sub-Saharan" DNA. I then began to look at my DNA matches and only those who also descended from Grandma Indie also had these results. 

My grandmother's oldest sister tested her DNA with Ancestry.  Ancestry narrowed her African results down to the Cameroon, Congo & Western Bantu Peoples of Africa. This really piqued my interest, but I didn't really investigate further until I began reading a book that was describing superstitions, remedies, and recipes of former slaves and one story reminded me of one that has been told in my own family. In the book a former slave mentioned that cow manure tea brewed with mint could cure consumption. My grandmother tells a story of  how Grandmother Indie made sheep dung tea to cure grandmother's sister of the measles. Her sister didn't know what was in the tea, but grandma had seen Indie making it and was told not to tell her sister! 

This reminded me once again of the African DNA results. But this isn't the only connection to possible slave roots. The Evans Cemetery, I mentioned earlier, has lots of broken pieces of pottery scattered around. Each year when it's time to clean the cemetery, descendants go through and pick up any that have been strewn from weather and wildlife and place them once again on their ancestors graves. This tradition was started by Indie's mother Jane, who was sometimes called "Black Granny". According to stories told by her descendants, Granny Jane would take her grandchildren and walk over the country gathering broken dishes. They would then take them to decorate the graves at the cemetery. Each grave had a wooden frame built around it. Just before decoration, Jane and the children would carry water from the Little Mulberry creek to the cemetery where they would remove all the pottery and glass and wash it. Then they would take newspaper and place it in the frames as a weed barrier and then take the now clean pottery and glass and place it on the newspapers. (Taken from the Evans, Oark, Patterson Springs and Yale cemetery book compiled by Doris Evans and Jimmie Dewberry).

Evans Decoration 1939 (my grandmother is the baby being held by her father, Newell)

Jane's son Rev. William Walker EVANS at his wife's grave.

Below are some current photos of the broken pottery that remains. 

 

Whenever I research this tradition of decorating graves with pottery online, the very first search result said,

The Africans of the Congo introduced this tradition of decorating graves with grave goods to America. They did this by using pots and shells as grave goods to signify certain statuses or traits, honoring and protecting the spirit. [3] This tradition has continued through the twentieth century and has evolved over time.   

Another resource said,

In North America the surface decoration of graves with ceramics and other objects is the most commonly recognized African-American material culture indicator of cemetery sites. William Faulkner, in Go Down, Moses, described a black cemetery with “shards of pottery and broken bottles and old brick and other objects insignificant to sight but actually of a profound meaning and fatal to touch, which no white man could have read”(Faulkner 1942:135; cf. Vlach 1978:139)

 

Notice above the mention of the Congo region of Africa, precisely the same area our DNA results indicate. Using Ancestry, I began to compare DNA results to other descendants of Jane and found several others had the same results ranging from 1%-3% of Cameroon, Congo and Western Bantu Peoples. From Jane's eldest daugher, Effie,  (pictured to the left and named after her maternal grandmother) my great aunt had three matches that shared this same African DNA. From Jane's son "Jody" my great aunt had one match that shared this same DNA as well as one who had Nigerian. And from another son, William, (pictured below) there one descendant who also had Nigerian DNA results. 



 
 

     From the maps below you can see that these two regions border one another. Several of these descendants also had Indigenous markers. All of this leads me to have a strong belief that not only was Jane's mother, Effie, native, but she was most likely also a descendant of a slave. We may not know the names of our ancestors going further back in Effie's lineage, but I think it's truly special that this particular custom belonging to her heritage remains today.

Also, today I noticed my flowering quince that I dug from Granny Jane's homestead a few years ago has bloomed for the first time. 

My Aunt Diane, my mother's sister, tested recently with Ancestry DNA and her results came back with Cameroon and Congo as well! 

Until next time, 
Becky