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Short filmTranscript
00:00Viewers like you make this program possible.
00:03Support your local PBS station.
00:15I'm Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
00:18Welcome to Finding Your Roots.
00:21In this episode, we'll meet actor Danielle Dedweiler
00:24and musician Rhiannon Giddens,
00:27two women whose family trees are filled with family secrets.
00:33Just humans making human decisions.
00:35Flawed, beautiful.
00:38But they want some love, apparently.
00:41And they're going to go get it.
00:43Oh, my God.
00:45Yes, this is the moonshiner.
00:48To uncover their roots, we've used every tool available.
00:53Genealogists comb through paper trails
00:56stretching back hundreds of years.
00:58This is so rich.
01:00While DNA experts utilize the latest advances in genetic analysis
01:04to reveal secrets that have lain hidden for generations.
01:08This is very intense.
01:11And we've compiled it all into a book of life,
01:14a record of all of our discoveries.
01:17Jeez Louise.
01:17And a window into the hidden past.
01:21The Hatwood branch of your family was freed before the Civil War.
01:24That's pretty, that's pretty crazy.
01:26Mm-hmm.
01:27How did they do that?
01:29I'm about to dream so good the next few days.
01:33Danielle and Rhiannon have deep roots in Georgia and North Carolina,
01:37and their family trees are filled with characters
01:41who might have been pulled from the pages of a Southern Gothic novel.
01:46In this episode, we're going to separate fact from fiction,
01:51revealing who my guest's ancestors really were,
01:55while shedding light on our nation's complex racial past.
02:00And we're going to separate fact from fiction,
02:39Danielle Deadweiler's eyes speak volumes.
02:43The renowned actor who enthralled audiences in Station Eleven,
02:49The Harder They Fall, and Till,
02:51is blessed with a steely gaze
02:54that can inspire everything from heartbreaking sorrow
02:57to abject terror.
03:00But while Danielle's performances are tightly controlled,
03:04off-camera, she's bursting with energy.
03:07And she told me that as a child growing up in Atlanta,
03:11she had no idea that she'd end up as an actor.
03:15She was just trying to stay busy.
03:19I was always super active.
03:22I did dance since I was, like, three, four years old.
03:27Taekwondo, soccer.
03:28If I could have played football, I would have.
03:31But my daddy wouldn't let me because I was a little.
03:34You know?
03:34So we just were a part of all these different things to keep us active.
03:39Hmm.
03:40When did you first discover that you were a performer,
03:42that you could entertain?
03:43My consciousness about it, I don't know.
03:46My mom says that she saw me dancing in front of the TV to Soul Train.
03:49Oh, yeah?
03:49And she was like, oh, I need to put that baby in dance.
03:51And so it's just always been there.
03:56Dan's classes would put Danielle on the path she's still following.
04:01But it would take time for her to find her way.
04:05After college, Danielle earned a master's degree from Columbia University,
04:11then took a job teaching school before realizing she'd made a mistake.
04:18I loved working with students.
04:21And because I had done, you know, GED, ESL, teaching whilst at Columbia.
04:28Mm-hmm.
04:29But I was still doing the other things.
04:31I was still in the arts.
04:33This was a moment of just working and feeling like, what am I doing?
04:38Something's off.
04:39This is not.
04:39This is, you know, the frequency is jammed.
04:43And I would do read-alouds with the students because everybody loves to be read to, right?
04:50Um, and that would steer, you know, the recollections, the echoes of who I really was.
04:58What were you reading?
04:59What were your favorite things to read aloud?
05:01Probably something, um, something sci-fi-ish or something like that.
05:07Right.
05:07That's what students were into at the time.
05:09Yeah.
05:09Um, but they, I would put so much performative spirit and energy into it.
05:16Because, and they would, you know, the other teachers would read, but, you know, they would
05:19particularly dig when I did what I did.
05:22I'm not bragging, but.
05:25And I felt it with them.
05:29Danielle would soon heed her own lesson.
05:32She began doing plays in Atlanta, then moved to Hollywood, where she's become a star, bringing
05:40life to a dizzying array of roles in almost every genre, from comedy to horror, historical
05:49drama to dystopian science fiction.
05:53But for all she's accomplished, Danielle remains deeply connected to the passion she first
05:59found in her childhood.
06:03Now, here's a thought experiment.
06:05If you could go back in time and talk to that young girl watching Soul Train, what advice
06:12would you give her?
06:13Oh, just dance all the time.
06:15Just keep dancing.
06:17It's the best thing.
06:19It connects you to everything.
06:21It connects you to the earth.
06:23It connects you to your body.
06:25It connects you to your people.
06:26It connects you to, to the above, to the beyond.
06:31It is a language.
06:33Um, and it is the, it's the language that you've always known.
06:41My second guest is Rhiannon Giddens, the Grammy Award-winning singer and banjo player, one of
06:50the most original talents in the long history of American folk music.
06:55And I don't have to worry what my hubby will think, because I'm no man's mama now.
07:02Rhiannon was born in North Carolina, a place steeped in musical traditions.
07:08And as a biracial child, with a white father and a black mother, she inherited the full
07:15range of those traditions, from country-western to blues, gospel, and soul.
07:22But while both Rhiannon and her sister showed that they had musical gifts at a young age, they
07:29weren't pushed onto the stage.
07:32Quite the contrary.
07:34We never really performed as kids.
07:37It's one of the things I'm so grateful to my mom, like, you know, like, uh, Star Search
07:41or whatever, they would do these, um, they would do these regional auditions.
07:45And so we'd always want to go, and we'd want to sing Whitney Houston, greatest love of all.
07:50And she'd be like, nope, you can do a kata.
07:53We were in karate.
07:54She made us do karate.
07:56And we were beginners.
07:57You know, you're kind of thinking like, you know, hidden tiger, crouching dragon, or whatever, like, doing all these kicks.
08:03We were not doing that.
08:04It was like, shh, shh.
08:05You know, we'd wait in line.
08:07We'd get up there.
08:08We'd do our little kata, not get picked, and then go home.
08:11And I feel like it was her way of just sort of turning us away from that, like, applause thing.
08:16So I'm super grateful that I never had that experience as a child other than in my chorus, which was
08:21a group thing.
08:22Very rarely got solos.
08:24That I never attached, like, the joy that I got from making music to applause.
08:30Rhiannon would soon be finding joy and applause on a very different stage.
08:38After high school, she was accepted into the prestigious conservatory at Oberlin College, where she studied opera and seemed destined
08:48for an international career.
08:51But when she moved to New York City to pursue that career, she realized the conservatory had not exactly prepared
09:00her for the challenges of the real world.
09:05It's great for the training, but, you know, they don't really teach you how to get a job.
09:10Because what you have to do is audition.
09:12You've got to send out tapes.
09:13You've got to, you know, you've got to live in New York.
09:15You've got to, like, travel.
09:16You've got to have money, basically, which I did not have.
09:18Right.
09:18And so, you know, you send in the tape, and then you wait to hear, did I get called back
09:22to this thing?
09:23Can I do this young artist program?
09:24Meanwhile, you've got to earn a living.
09:25And it's just, like, it's a different way of being.
09:28And I just was kind of like, I don't know if this is for me.
09:30Because I loved opera, but I was already kind of, I had sung, like, in different ways before I started
09:36singing classical music.
09:37It's not like I was singing that way for years before I went to Oberlin.
09:40I was learning a lot of that stuff for the first time.
09:42So I had sung, you know, folk stuff with my dad or whatever.
09:46Celtic stuff.
09:46I joined a Celtic band and kind of going, this is cool.
09:50You know, I can just, like, make a show.
09:53That realization changed Rhiannon's life, inspiring her to return to North Carolina,
10:01take up the banjo, a traditional African-American instrument,
10:05and shift her focus from opera to folk music.
10:10The results have been spectacular.
10:13Right where there's smoke, babe, you know there's a fire.
10:16Ooh, yeah.
10:17Everybody's killed.
10:18In the past two decades, Rhiannon has released three celebrated solo albums and collaborated on dozens more,
10:27finding fame and artistic satisfaction along the way.
10:32Just as importantly, she's also come to grips with her own biracial heritage.
10:41I think every mixed person has this experience, well, I don't want to speak for everybody,
10:46but many of us have, of, you know, being looked at with suspicion because we're not dark enough.
10:53Uh-huh.
10:53Um, like, experiences like, you know, listening to Queen Latifah and, like, black girl goes by and is like,
11:00listening to Queen Latifah don't make you black, you know.
11:02I was like, wasn't aware that that was what I was trying to do.
11:05I just liked Queen Latifah, you know.
11:07But I, you know, just having experiences like that and being questioned constantly by people,
11:11what are you?
11:12Uh-huh.
11:12No originally.
11:13Uh-huh.
11:14What are your parents?
11:14No originally.
11:15No, right, yeah.
11:15I was saying that every, like, vague-looking ethnic person has to go through.
11:19Right.
11:20So, you know, I had to kind of come to terms with, you know, what does it mean to be
11:24black?
11:25What does it mean to be white?
11:26What does it mean to be mixed?
11:28What do you claim?
11:29How can you be both at the same time?
11:31Right.
11:31You know, because I'm like, I got a lot of experience with my white family.
11:35Uh-huh.
11:35You know, like, does that negate, just because society calls me a certain thing,
11:40does that negate my whole dad's side of the family and all the experience that I've had with them?
11:44You know what I mean?
11:45Uh-huh.
11:45You know, it's been a journey.
11:48But for me, honestly, the banjo was at the center of releasing that because I was like,
11:52you know what?
11:53Being black is a lot of things.
11:54Uh-huh.
11:55Yes.
11:55And this is the center of being black for me.
11:58It doesn't have to be for you.
11:59It doesn't have to be for you.
12:00But for me, the history of what we've put into this instrument and how, where I'm from
12:07and the connections I have to it and the lineage that I carry, I don't need to prove anything
12:12to anybody.
12:12But it was the music that gave me that grounding as a North Carolinian.
12:17That's why I say, you know, I'm North Carolinian, black, white, yellow, whatever.
12:20I'm North Carolinian.
12:21And that's enough for me.
12:25My two guests both grew up in the South, in and around the same places where their ancestors
12:32had lived for centuries.
12:34But both came to me knowing little about the lives of those ancestors.
12:39It was time for that to change.
12:42I started with Danielle and with her father, Ricky Deadweiler, a railroad supervisor who
12:51provided for his family and inspired his daughter with his tireless devotion to his job.
12:59My dad was a freaking workaholic, you know, working for the railroad and the capacity in which
13:05he did is 24-7.
13:07You're on call all the time.
13:09If there's a derailment or anything happening, he had to be there.
13:14He traveled a lot, and I understood that to, you know, be how stability was made.
13:22He had to go to work.
13:23So I get that.
13:25I get that discipline.
13:26I get that straight focus.
13:30Yeah.
13:31Do you know much about his roots?
13:33Not a wealth.
13:35Did he talk much about them?
13:37Here and there.
13:40Ricky's reticence may well have been due to the fact that the Deadweilers have very complicated
13:46roots.
13:47Indeed, digging into his family tree, we encountered a series of mysteries that we struggled mightily
13:54to solve.
13:56The first begins with Ricky's grandmother, a woman named Hattie Mae Deadweiler.
14:02However, records show that Hattie Mae married Ricky's grandfather, Roy Lee Hall, in 1932, when
14:12she claimed to be 19 years old.
14:15But we're not sure that's correct.
14:18The paper trail varies as to what year Hattie was born, ranging from 1911 to 1917, meaning that
14:28she could have been as old as 21 or as young as 15.
14:36So sometimes she would be 21, sometimes 15.
14:40Can you imagine getting married when you're 15 years old?
14:44That's some Zora Neale Hurst and stuff right there.
14:46That's right.
14:47Ten years, she just like...
14:48You don't need to know how old I am.
14:50That's none of your business, but I'm here.
14:52That's right.
14:53And I am ten years of one day wake up and, wow, I feel lighter.
14:57I'm ten years younger.
14:59Exactly.
15:00I dig it.
15:03Though we don't know Hattie's exact age, we did discover something curious about her marriage
15:09to Roy.
15:11In the 1940 census, we found their son, Imel, living with an uncle.
15:18But Hattie and Roy were not in the same house.
15:23Oh.
15:25Hmm.
15:26So what do you think's going on there?
15:29I guess I don't know.
15:31Well, we have a theory.
15:33When the census was recorded, Hattie appears to have been living with her sister Gladys in
15:37Athens.
15:38And when we went looking for Roy, we came across something surprising.
15:43Please turn the page.
15:45That was a dramatic use of your hand.
15:50This is from the Georgia State Archives.
15:52Would you please read that transcribed section?
15:55Marriage license.
15:56Roy Lee Hall and Lily Mae Strange were joined in matrimony this 31st day of December 1939.
16:04Your great-grandfather got married to another woman.
16:09Yep.
16:10And guess what?
16:11What?
16:11We found no record of a divorce.
16:14Okay.
16:15So it is, of course, possible that they never divorced at all.
16:20Hmm.
16:21Hmm.
16:22So what do you think happened to Roy and Hattie's relationship?
16:29It's Georgia.
16:30It's the 30s.
16:32It's 40s.
16:32It's the 80s.
16:33Who knows?
16:34Yeah.
16:35Um, who knows?
16:37Who knows?
16:38Who knows?
16:40Danielle is right.
16:42There's no way to know what came between Hattie and Roy.
16:46But their son, Amel, was raised with his mother's surname.
16:50And Roy Lee Hall seems to have been forgotten.
16:56Ironically, Roy's death certificate reveals that his own name stemmed from similar circumstances.
17:05Date of death, 8-14-1971.
17:09Place of death, Wilkinson, Georgia.
17:12Father's name, Rogers Lowe.
17:15Mm-hmm.
17:16Mother's maiden name, Maddie Lou Hall.
17:19Roy died from heart trouble at the age of 57.
17:24My father's grandfather.
17:26Your father's grandfather.
17:27And then you see his father's name and his mother's name.
17:32That's right.
17:33Amen.
17:33Can you read their names for me again?
17:35Rogers Lowe, Maddie Lou Hall.
17:39And you notice anything about those names?
17:41Yep.
17:43They got their mother's name.
17:45Yes.
17:46Yeah.
17:46They don't share the same surname.
17:47Mm-hmm.
17:48That's another generation of your father's family who did not take their father's surname.
17:52Yeah.
17:53Yeah.
17:54What's it like to see that?
17:55Wild.
17:58We now set out to see what became of Roy's father, Rogers, and encountered a situation that
18:05was painfully familiar.
18:06In the 1920 census, Roy is listed as a five-year-old boy living in the house of his mother,
18:15Maddie
18:16Lou Hall, and her parents, but Rogers Lowe is not living with the family.
18:25So we wonder what in the world is going on here.
18:29Would you please turn the page?
18:31This is getting more and more dramatic as it goes.
18:35Would you please read the transcribed section?
18:38Lowe, Roger, head of household, age 21, occupation, laborer, bauxite mining, Annie, wife, age 24,
18:49Ivy L, son, age 3 and 1 month, Gordon, son, age 2 and 2 months, Sadie B, daughter, age 4
19:01months.
19:02And you recognize that Roger Lowe, Roger Lowe is Roy's father, but he has a wife and three
19:09children in another town.
19:14Rogers married a woman named Annie Mae Davis in 1915.
19:18Your great-grandfather Roy wasn't even two years old when he married another woman.
19:26How does it feel to see that?
19:29People, right?
19:31They're people.
19:33History makes it look all, you know, distant and, you know, but this is, oh, it's just humans
19:42making human decisions.
19:45Flawed, beautiful, continuing with life.
19:49But they want some love, apparently.
19:52And they're going to go get it.
19:56We had now traced Danielle's father's roots back over a hundred years, uncovering a pattern
20:03that crossed multiple generations.
20:07A pattern of absent fathers, of mothers being left to pick up the pieces, and of children
20:15forced to get by without a parent.
20:19This is interesting.
20:22So, seeing this pattern laid out, does it change the way that you think of your own
20:26father, since he broke that pattern?
20:31Sure.
20:32Yeah.
20:35He's, he's the man who wants to be committed to family.
20:38Mm-hmm.
20:38Yeah.
20:39To a kind of structure.
20:41Do you think there's cause and effect?
20:43That he's reacting against?
20:44Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
20:45Yeah.
20:46Oh, yeah.
20:46Yeah.
20:47You, you often think that you need to do the opposite thing that you've witnessed that
20:54doesn't work.
20:54Yeah.
20:55Yeah.
20:56I had one final detail to share with Danielle, the source of her distinctive surname.
21:04We were able to trace the Deadweiler family back almost two centuries to Danielle's third
21:11great-grandfather, Gaines Deadweiler, who was born in Georgia around 1840.
21:19Seeing this mapped out proved thrilling to Danielle, as did the realization that she's only a Deadweiler
21:28thanks to her great-grandmother, Hattie, who chose to pass on her own surname rather than
21:36that of her husband.
21:39It's cool.
21:41It's like we don't have to adhere to, you know, these structures and traditions.
21:50Mm-hmm.
21:51And starting with your name is critical, you know.
21:57August Wilson wrote his name, right, when he first, when he first started, when he got his
22:01typewriter from his, the gift of $20 from his sister.
22:05The first thing he wanted to see was his name.
22:06Yeah.
22:07So he typed his name.
22:08So the idea that the first thing, the thing that my great-grandmother did was I'm going
22:15to maintain my name.
22:16My child is going to maintain, you know, my name.
22:20And that persists for my, you know, great-grandchild.
22:23Like, it's like you get to define how you want to be in the world.
22:28That's a great way to put it.
22:29Yeah.
22:30Yeah.
22:30Yeah.
22:31And that's pretty dope.
22:34Much like Danielle, Rhiannon Giddens has an ancestor who utterly redefined her family.
22:41But the story starts closer to home.
22:43In 1970, just three years after interracial marriage was legalized in the United States,
22:54Rhiannon's father, Paul Giddens, dismayed his parents and grandparents by marrying Rhiannon's
23:01mother and soon found himself disowned.
23:06The fracture might have been permanent.
23:09But after the birth of the couple's first child, Paul's mother made a choice.
23:16My sister was his mother, Margaret's first grandchild.
23:20Oh.
23:21And his, you know, it's like I always say one person can change the tenor of an entire family.
23:25Right?
23:26So his, his, my grandmother, Grandma Giddens, she was a God-fearing woman.
23:31Only book in the house was the Bible, you know.
23:34And she, like, was concerned, you know, she wouldn't have been hateful, but she was concerned,
23:39like, what about the children, you know, when he married mom?
23:42But then my sister came along and she had a, you know, she had a decision in that time.
23:47Right.
23:47I can be a bigot or not.
23:49Right.
23:49And she went for love.
23:51That's great.
23:51And she's just, she was just love incarnate and in, you know, it's not to say things
23:56were smooth on that side of the family, because they were not.
23:58Right.
23:59But because she was a beacon, you know, and she wholeheartedly supported him and his
24:04choice of family, I think that then had branches that then sort of blossomed as the years passed.
24:10She was a pretty amazing woman.
24:14Unfortunately, Margaret's attitude was not shared by her mother.
24:18A woman named Edith Hanner.
24:22Edith never accepted her grandson's marriage.
24:26And as a result, Rhiannon knew very little about Edith.
24:31She'd been told that Edith was married to a man named George Clifton Hanner.
24:37And she'd also heard that there was a moonshiner in her past.
24:41But beyond that, Edith was a mystery.
24:46One that Rhiannon had never been inclined to explore.
24:52She didn't really, I never really felt like she thought of us the same as the other grandkids.
25:00Mm-hmm.
25:01Um, like, yeah, Christmastime.
25:04It's a very marked difference in presents and things, you know.
25:06Right.
25:07Um, so we went out to visit occasionally, um, to, as, you know, because it was family.
25:16But it was not, we, we had a hard time going out there sometimes.
25:20Oh, it's too bad.
25:21I'm sorry about that.
25:22Yeah.
25:22That's like the time and the life and the whatever, you know.
25:25Have you heard any stories about her relationship with George?
25:29No.
25:30Could you please turn the page?
25:32Okay.
25:35This is a newspaper article published in the Greensboro Daily Record.
25:38Oh, my God.
25:40May 27th.
25:41Yes.
25:421929.
25:43This is the moonshiner.
25:44That's right.
25:44George was 23 years old.
25:46I didn't know he was arrested.
25:47He had been married to Edith for about three years.
25:49Would you please read that transcribed section in the white box?
25:52Cliff Hanner was arrested by county officers Saturday night when they found the worm of
25:56a still in his possession.
25:57The officers were on an expedition in the vicinity of Tabernacle Church when they caught
26:02Hanner.
26:02He will be given a hearing tomorrow afternoon.
26:05Your great-grandfather was arrested for possessing one of the key components of a still.
26:09Yes.
26:10During Prohibition.
26:12I see.
26:12Well, it's funny because Grandma, uh, was a total teetotaler.
26:17Mm-hmm.
26:18Oh, what a shock.
26:19I mean, it's like, it's, it's a, it's a funny, it's a funny thing.
26:23Um, wow.
26:25We found over a dozen news articles reporting that Rhiannon's great-grandfather George was,
26:33in fact, involved in distilling and selling his own alcohol.
26:39And this was only the beginning of his problems.
26:43Matters of record, municipal county court, George C. Hanner, drunk, 30 days suspended.
26:48Your great-grandfather was convicted of public drunkenness.
26:51Have you ever heard anything about that?
26:53No.
26:55I mean, you know, he's a moonshiner, so I guess, you know, he's drinking his own stuff.
26:58I don't know.
27:00Well, this story is more complicated than it might seem.
27:03Hmm.
27:04Could you please turn the page?
27:06George, this record we found in the state archives of North Carolina.
27:10Would you please read that transcribe section?
27:12Yes.
27:13Edith Wilson Hanner versus G.C. Hanner.
27:15Have the plaintiff and the defendant been separated for two years?
27:18Answer, yes.
27:18Edith Wilson Hanner, the plaintiff, is hereby granted an absolute divorce from the defendant,
27:23G.C. Hanner, this the 16th day of December, 1946.
27:27When George was convicted in the record we just saw, your great-grandparents had just separated.
27:32Yeah.
27:33What's it like to learn that?
27:34Um, it's just, it's the story of, it's the sad story of a life unraveling.
27:41Records show that George and Edith were separated for at least two years prior to their divorce.
27:47And during those years, George was cited for public drunkenness at least three more times.
27:54But it turns out that Edith had secrets of her own.
28:00Oh, boy.
28:03So this is the year before George and Edith got divorced.
28:05Would you please read that transcribe section?
28:07Well, well, Edith.
28:09Edith, Sherman M. Amick, and Edith Minnie Hanner were charged with occupying a room at 221 South Green Street for
28:15immoral purposes.
28:17Whoa.
28:18Wow.
28:20All right.
28:21Mm-hmm.
28:22I'm not gonna, I'm not going down the road of he, she drove him to drink, but.
28:27So it shows that there was maybe multiple reasons for a divorce.
28:31Did your great-grandmother become more interesting now than, now that you've turned the page?
28:36I mean, that's definitely, no, I wasn't expecting that.
28:38Yeah, that's for sure.
28:41According to this article, in May of 1945, Rhiannon's great-grandmother was arrested in Greensboro for renting a room with
28:51a man named Sherman Amick, who was known around town as Snake.
28:58Snake?
28:59What?
29:01Edith, wow.
29:02All right.
29:03Now she got interested.
29:06He also was a convicted bootlegger.
29:08Oh, well, she, yeah, wow, okay.
29:11And he and Edith had a relationship.
29:13Clearly.
29:14Any family stories about that?
29:16I have, not that I have heard.
29:18Not that it have come down to me.
29:20So, now think about this.
29:22At the time, Edith was still technically married to your great-grandfather.
29:26Mm-hmm.
29:27Even though they were separated.
29:29Um, so what do you mean?
29:31I mean, this is a scandal in the paper.
29:33Yeah, I mean, if it's happening during the separation, you know, it's kind of like there's a little bit of
29:39gray area there because they've already announced the intent to divorce.
29:44Mm-hmm.
29:44So, she may feel like I'm, you know, not legally a free woman, but, like, morally I'm a free woman
29:49because I'm, you know.
29:51Yeah.
29:51So.
29:52They were separated.
29:53Yeah.
29:53Yeah.
29:54I can understand that.
29:56We don't know what happened to the case against Edith.
30:00The court records have been lost.
30:03But it seems that she moved on from Snake.
30:07Roughly a year after she was arrested with him, and just a week after her divorce from George was finalized,
30:14Edith married a man named Paul May, whom Rhiannon met on multiple occasions.
30:21Causing her to reconsider her great-grandmother once more.
30:28It doesn't make me, you know, warm to her in the phase that I knew her, but it makes me
30:34interested in her life, you know, because, like, everybody has a life before they're old.
30:38You know what I mean?
30:39Sure.
30:39Everybody was young.
30:40If they're lucky.
30:40If they're lucky.
30:41Everybody was young.
30:42Everybody, you know, had youthful peccadillos or whatever.
30:44And it does help humanize people to, like, hear these kind of stories, you know?
30:50All right.
30:51Let's return, then, to your great-grandfather, George, charged with public drunkenness at least twice after Edith remarried.
31:00Right.
31:01Do you know what happened to him after that?
31:04I don't.
31:05Please turn to me.
31:06Something tells me you do.
31:09And now you do.
31:10Would you please read the transcribed section?
31:13In the Superior Court of Greensboro Division, 1958, the court finding as a fact that defendants George Clifton Hanner, Garland
31:19Clayton Reese, Harry Ray Stewart, Reese was convicted of, Hanner and Stewart entered pleas of guilty to the illegal possession,
31:26non-tax-paid liquor, in the amount of 60 gallons.
31:3060 gallons.
31:31Man, you just can't stay away.
31:33No.
31:36In the wake of this arrest, George pleaded guilty and was given two concurrent one-year sentences in a North
31:46Carolina prison.
31:48He would die of a heart attack at age 63.
31:51But the story of his grim fate drew Rhiannon's thoughts to something far more hopeful, the larger trajectory of her
32:03father's family.
32:06It's like a family's either going down or it's going up.
32:10And sometimes it can be because of one person.
32:13So it's like going back to my grandmother, you know, she kind of grew up with this chaotic, you know,
32:19at one point they were homeless and, you know, this chaotic life.
32:23And to raise three children that, you know, lived, have been living, you know, my uncle sadly has passed, but
32:30have lived pretty great lives and their children are all doing, like, really amazing things.
32:37So it's like there's a way to go.
32:40It doesn't always have to be one way, you know, but, like, it can be that matriarch that can really
32:46make that difference, you know, and where a family's going.
32:51We'd already traced Danielle Dedeweiler back to her third great-grandfather, Gaines Dedeweiler, who likely passed away sometime around 1900.
33:03Now, turning to another branch of her father's family tree, we were able to go back even further, mapping a
33:12line that stretched almost two centuries into the past.
33:17Second great-grandfather, Lathie Stanley, third great-grandmother, March Stanley, fourth great-grandfather, Sprigg Stanley, fifth great-grandfather.
33:33Let me tell you something about these names.
33:35They're poetic, aren't they?
33:39The Southerners are, they come with it.
33:43No, that's true.
33:44Sprigg.
33:44Sprigg.
33:45Mm, okay.
33:47Your fifth great-grandfather, that is your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.
33:52Now, when you sat down here, did you think that we would be able to get back to your fifth
33:57great-grandfather on your daddy's side?
33:58I had no clue.
33:59I had no clue.
34:02Naming Danielle's fifth great-grandfather was one thing.
34:06Researching his life would prove far more complicated.
34:09As we immediately confronted one of the greatest of all genealogical challenges, identifying ancestors who were trapped in slavery.
34:21Enslaved people were almost never listed by name in federal documents.
34:31Our best chance to learn about him was to find him in the records of the people who may have
34:38owned him.
34:39And in the 1860 census for Georgia, we uncovered a clue, a slave schedule for a white planter named Edward
34:50M. Stanley.
34:52It lists nine enslaved people, not by name, only by age, color, and gender.
35:00At the time, Sprigg would have been about 30 years old.
35:06So you see anyone about that age?
35:09Yes.
35:10Yes.
35:12We believe that you're looking at your fifth great-grandfather, Sprigg.
35:16Okay.
35:18Okay.
35:19Who is a nameless Mark.
35:22Yeah.
35:25Yeah.
35:26What's it like to see that?
35:28You know...
35:38I'm quieted in that, you know, it's, uh...
35:45It's confusing, it's upsetting, it's, um...
35:53You see all the textures on the skin of something.
35:57If this hash mark does, in fact, represent Sprigg, it means that in 1860, he was owned by Edward M.
36:07Stanley, who was then only 12 years old.
36:12This suggests that Edward likely inherited Sprigg.
36:16So we went looking for estate records that might give us more information.
36:21And it didn't take long for our search to pay off.
36:27R. L. Cumming, guardian of Edward M. Stanley, minor, heir of James R. Stanley, deceased, received from the estate of
36:37James R. Stanley the following property on the 16th, December, 1858.
36:43Sprigg's man, aged 28 years, valued at $1,000.
36:56Yeah.
36:58Yeah.
37:01Yeah.
37:06This record is part of the probate file of Edward's father, a man named James R. Stanley.
37:12It indicates that Edward received Sprigg from James' estate in December of 1858.
37:21Digging deeper, we found the will of James' father from March of 1841 and saw that Sprigg had been one
37:30of the Stanley family's possessions for decades.
37:34Indeed, James had inherited Sprigg from his father.
37:39I give and bequeath unto my son, James R. Stanley, his heirs, and assigns the following Negroes, Ned, Jenny, Lewis,
37:47and Betsy, and their increase, all of which he has already in possession also, after the death or widowhood of
37:54my wife, Jim, Mary, Sprigg, and Molly, and their increase to him and his heirs forever.
38:00Forever.
38:01Forever.
38:06What do you think Sprigg must have been feeling toward the three generations of this family who owned him?
38:15Ugh.
38:24Not too connected.
38:26Uh-huh.
38:29Not too connected.
38:33We had now reconstructed much of Sprigg's life in slavery, but there was one haunting detail still to share.
38:41The 1880 federal census indicates that Sprigg and his parents, Danielle's unnamed six great-grandparents, were all born in Virginia,
38:52meaning that Sprigg was likely transported south to Georgia as a young boy.
38:58But we don't know if his parents came with him, and we could find no evidence that they did.
39:07Yeah.
39:09No way that didn't affect him.
39:12Surely.
39:14Surely.
39:15I mean, what's it like to think that your ancestor may have been separated from his parents when he was
39:20a child and never saw them again?
39:22I mean, can you imagine?
39:25I, I, I, I mean, losing my mother was the most, um, horrific idea that I thought of as a
39:32kid.
39:32Uh-huh.
39:33You know?
39:33I didn't want to, sometimes I didn't want to stay at my grandparents' house because I'd be in the dark,
39:37and because I was in Athens, and I'd much rather be in Atlanta.
39:41Sure, yeah.
39:41But, because we, we, we need them, and so, he was a boy in the dark.
39:55There was a final twist to this story, a happy one.
39:59When freedom finally came, Sprigg settled down on a farm with his wife and children.
40:06But that wasn't all that he did.
40:09In 1867, black men in Georgia were given the right to vote.
40:15And despite a rising tide of white resistance, Sprigg bravely chose to exercise that right.
40:24Date of registry, June 29th, 1867.
40:29Names of voters, Stanley Sprigg colored.
40:36Boom.
40:39Yeah.
40:40As soon as he could.
40:42Yeah.
40:42Your fifth great grandfather registered to vote.
40:44Yeah.
40:46And they were threatened.
40:47They risked their lives.
40:49Did it anyway.
40:50Because those former Confederates did not want to, because that was black power.
40:54Yeah.
40:54This is, this is, this is so rich.
40:58This is so rich.
41:00And Danielle, he couldn't even read or write.
41:02This is the richest.
41:04Yeah.
41:05He did it anyway.
41:06Did it anyway.
41:07Yeah.
41:09Sprigg.
41:10Yeah.
41:13Just like Danielle, Rhiannon Giddens knew that she had ancestors who'd been enslaved.
41:19In fact, she tried to research them in connection with her music and in the same brick wall that
41:26so many people hit.
41:28But that did not deter us.
41:31And when we focused on Rhiannon's maternal third great grandfather, a man named William
41:38Reiser, we got lucky.
41:41We found William and his mother, Hannah Reiser, in the 1870 census for Clark County, Alabama.
41:50And in the 1860 census for that same county, we found the slave schedule for a white farmer
41:57named Dicey Reiser.
42:00As we'd seen, these schedules are challenging to interpret.
42:04The entries on them do not contain names, only notations for age, color, and gender.
42:12But given what we knew about Rhiannon's ancestors, two entries stood out.
42:19So do you see anyone who might be around 28 or around 48 years old?
42:24Well, there's a male, 28, and then a female, 50.
42:31That's right.
42:31Yeah.
42:32Which, of course, like the ages are probably approximate anyway.
42:35Of course.
42:35Yeah.
42:35So what's it like to see that?
42:37To think that those marks might be your family?
42:41Yeah.
42:42I mean, listed there, robbed of their names.
42:45Yeah.
42:45Just identified his property on a separate slave schedule.
42:48Yeah.
42:49I mean, cash, basically.
42:51Yeah.
42:53Yeah.
42:55It's the reality of it.
42:59We now began to search for evidence that these hash marks did, in fact, represent Rhiannon's
43:06family.
43:06And we soon uncovered the estate records of Dicey Riser's father, a man named Noah Dykes.
43:15They list Rhiannon's fourth great-grandmother, Hannah, by name, bringing Rhiannon a measure
43:23of deep satisfaction.
43:27It's amazing to have a name, because names are so difficult.
43:31Mm-hmm.
43:31You know, we're so nameless so often.
43:34Right.
43:35And that's a way of empowering the people who control names and disempowering the people
43:41whose name you can take away.
43:43Exactly.
43:43So you hear the, you know, you hear female, age 48, you know, that means nothing.
43:49Mm-hmm.
43:49When you hear Hannah, your mind conjures up somebody.
43:55Tragically, the same records that preserve Hannah's name also detail the depth of her
44:02suffering.
44:03When her owner passed away in 1832, his will gave Hannah and her young son, Ben, to one
44:11of his children, while Hannah's daughter, Violet, was bequeathed to another child, meaning
44:18that Hannah's family was broken up.
44:23It's crazy.
44:24Mm-hmm.
44:25It's just crazy.
44:26It is.
44:27It's like, why are people surprised that we're falling apart?
44:30Mm-hmm.
44:30It's just crazy.
44:32You know what I mean?
44:33Yeah.
44:33It's like, there was a whole system with receipts.
44:37You could get a receipt for a person.
44:39Yeah.
44:39You could put an ad in the paper for a person.
44:42Mm-hmm.
44:42That's bananas.
44:43It is.
44:43And for hundreds of years.
44:45And we wonder why we're, like, completely insane.
44:48Wow.
44:51This is as far back as we could trace Rhiannon's riser ancestors.
44:57Turning to another branch of her mother's family tree, the Hatwoods, we wanted to see if we
45:03could go further.
45:05We were expecting yet again to hit the brick wall of slavery.
45:09But we were in for a surprise.
45:13In the 1860 census for North Carolina, Rhiannon's fourth great-grandfather, a man named Alfred
45:21Hatwood, is listed by name, along with the names of his family.
45:27Alfred Hatwood, age 58, mulatto, occupation farmer, value of real estate, $500, value of
45:33personal estate, $150.
45:35Mary, age 56, mulatto, occupation housekeeper.
45:38Jehu, age 20, mulatto, occupation laborer.
45:40Katie, age 15, mulatto, Lavinia, age 12, mulatto, John, age 6, mulatto.
45:45And what year is the census?
45:471860.
45:49And the Civil War breaks out in 1861.
45:51Yeah, so he's free.
45:53He was free.
45:53Mm-hmm.
45:54The Hatwood branch of your family was freed before the Civil War.
45:59Hmm.
46:00And in North Carolina, that's pretty, that's pretty crazy.
46:03Mm-hmm.
46:03How did they do that?
46:06We don't know how the Hatwoods became free, but Alfred's story is incredible.
46:13In 1810, when he was roughly seven years old, Alfred was indentured as an apprentice to work
46:21for a white farmer.
46:23His indenture agreement states that in exchange for housing and food, he was to labor without
46:29pay until his 21st birthday.
46:33The agreement also indicates that Alfred was an orphan, so he likely had no family support
46:40awaiting him once his indenture ended.
46:43The odds against him having any kind of success were enormous, but somehow, Alfred beat those
46:51odds.
46:52In the 1850 census, we found him on a farm in Chatham County, North Carolina, living with
47:01his wife and nine children.
47:06Mm.
47:07Alfred was an orphan.
47:09Now he's head of a household full of kids.
47:12Good Lord.
47:13What's it like to see that?
47:14I, I, it makes me, it makes me really happy because, um, I really believe that to be of
47:26the South is to hold infinite storylines.
47:30Mm-hmm.
47:30You know?
47:31Every single story, like, adds shades and complexity to the Southern story.
47:38You know, there's, there's, we tend to talk about things like, you know, the Civil War.
47:43And slavery.
47:44Mm-hmm.
47:44And like, that's the South.
47:46And it's like, there were just lots of people having things happen to them.
47:50Yeah.
47:51You know, and, and trying to live their lives.
47:53But it also shows us that there were cracks and fissures in the simple binary world that
47:58we've constructed.
47:59Exactly.
47:59Between black and white.
48:00Mm-hmm.
48:00And slave and free.
48:02Yep.
48:02And your family is living in that, those cracks and fissures.
48:07Absolutely.
48:07Big time.
48:09We had one more record to share with Rhiannon, a record that would add another layer of complexity
48:17to her distinctly Southern story.
48:19Turning back to her father's roots, we focused on her fourth great-grandfather, a man named
48:27Henry Schaffner.
48:29Henry was born around 1806 in North Carolina.
48:33And in the 1850 census, we saw that he was very much a man of his era.
48:41Name of slave owner, Henry Schaffner.
48:43One black female, age 29.
48:45One black female, age 27.
48:47One black male, age 11.
48:49One black female, age 8.
48:50One black female, age 6.
48:52One black male, age 3.
48:54One black male, age 11 months.
48:55Had you ever thought about the slave owners in your family tree?
49:01You know, I knew there was a chance.
49:03I figured there weren't, I figured just because people were poor, there was probably not a lot
49:08of it, you know, just because, you know, that was wealth, was owning people.
49:13And you would have if you could have.
49:15Right.
49:16Absolutely.
49:18So, yeah, I mean, I suspected as much.
49:22Yeah.
49:22You descend from enslaved people on your mother's side, and enslavers, owners of enslaved people,
49:29on your father's side.
49:31Yeah.
49:31Which puts you in a very interesting position, you know, as a mixed race person.
49:36And your relationship to slavery is bifurcated.
49:45Complicated and bifurcated.
49:46Yeah, you got it.
49:47The paper trail had run out for each of my guests.
49:50Oh, wow.
49:51That's so cool.
49:53It was time to show them their full family trees.
49:57These are all the ancestors.
49:58Now filled with people whose names they'd never heard before.
50:02Wow.
50:03For each, it was a moment of pride.
50:05It's beautiful.
50:06Offering the chance to reflect on the men and women who shaped them to the core.
50:14What do you think all these ancestors would have made of you?
50:19Who knows?
50:20It would be the gamut of, what is that one, girl?
50:25I'd like to think that they appreciate that I want to represent and talk about all of them and not
50:32just some of them.
50:33No, I think that.
50:34You know?
50:35I hear the church saying amen.
50:37Yeah.
50:38I mean, this is the fullness of, you know, who we are.
50:41Just because society says you have to choose doesn't mean that you actually do.
50:47My time with my guests was drawing to a close, but I still had a surprise left for Danielle.
50:54When we compared her DNA to that of others who've been in the series, we found a match.
51:02Evidence of a distant cousin she never knew she had.
51:10That is Rebecca Hall.
51:11I am gagged.
51:13Do you know we share a birthday?
51:14Really?
51:15Yes.
51:16How do you know that?
51:17I met Rebecca.
51:18Wow.
51:19And we, I, I, I mean, it was a thing for me to be like, oh, we have the same
51:22birthday.
51:23Well, you had more than that.
51:24You had a lot of DNA in common.
51:26This is a gag.
51:29Danielle shares a long segment of DNA with celebrated actor Rebecca Hall, whose mother was roughly 20% sub-Saharan
51:39African.
51:42Rebecca Hall just got blacker in her own mind, without a doubt.
51:46Stop.
51:46Stop.
51:47She black.
51:47You, we, we know that it's in there, but goodness gracious, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have guessed.
51:53No, I told you.
51:54I wouldn't have guessed.
51:54She would be so happy.
51:58We're birthday twins and we're cousins.
52:00That's amazing.
52:01That is amazing.
52:03That's the end of our journey with Danielle Deadweiler and Rhiannon Giddens.
52:10Join me next time when we unlock the secrets of the past for new guests on another episode of Finding
52:19Your Roots.
52:20Finding Your Roots is a production of the past for new guests on another episode of Finding Your Roots.
52:20Finding Your Roots is a production of the past for new guests on another episode of Finding Your Roots.
52:20Finding Your Roots is a production of the past for new guests on another episode of Finding Your Roots.
52:20Finding Your Roots is a production of the past for new guests on another episode of the past for new
52:20guests on another episode of Finding Your Roots.
52:20You
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