Sharpton and Thurmond

I got a kick out of the recent news that Al Sharpton and Strom Thurmond have a common past…Ancestry.com is a legitimate source for tracing one’s history. I know first hand. Ancestry.com helped me piece together parts of my slave past. which I was able to share with my siblings and my mother before she passed away last year. In short my great grandmother on my mother’s side, Millie, was a “Buckner”. Grandma Millie was born in 1870 in Pembroke Kentucky to Joe and Millie, former slaves on the Buckner plantation. Slaves in Kentucky were not freed by President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. That act applied only to slaves in Confederate states. Kentucky, a border state, never left the Union and therefore needed its own proclamation before Joe and Millie and their parents on the Buckner plantation could be set free. Once free Joe and Millie Buckner had nowhere to go so they remained on the massive farm in slave quarters and worked as cheap labor. Millie was born free; but by age ten she had already been farmed out and living in the home of a well do white man. The census listed her as a nurse maid. I recall Grandma Millie never talked about her past or her parents. I figured she never really knew them. From my Mom I knew that Millie had a tough life; that her husband Jim Bell was killed in or near Pembroke and Millie came to Louisville, my hometown alone with her children including Ivory, the youngest of the Buckner’s...my Mother’s Mom.