Illustration by Colin Johnson
Julius Hunter did not go quietly into retirement. The former KMOV (Channel 4) anchorman, now vice president for community relations at Saint Louis University, is also a St. Louis police commissioner. But threaded through his formal pursuits is a less obvious passion: helping people find their roots. Julius Hunter, respected journalist, broadcast legend, community servant, is a genealogy nut, and he happily shares his knowledge with anyone willing to listen.
For Hunter, what began as a search for his own heritage has turned into a passion. “I think it is very important to know from whence you came so you can get an idea of your own self-worth and maybe set some goals for yourself,” he says. “That sounds complicated, but it’s the truth. Growing up, my own family was ashamed of the fact that we came from slave ancestry. My relatives, in their seventies, eighties and nineties, wouldn’t talk about it. When I researched my family and showed them there was dignity, ingenuity and resourcefulness in their ancestors, it changed everything.”
Hunter’s great-great-grandfather Ned Rounds was born a slave in 1824. After becoming a free man, Rounds realized that his community had no experience handling money, so he set himself up as a banker, keeping money and charging a small amount for the service. He even helped found a little community called Honey Island, near Yazoo City, Miss., with about 36 households and its own church.
Rounds also had a wagon—and the horses to go with it—for anyone who needed one. “In a way,” Hunter says, “he became the first Enterprise car rental of Yazoo City, Miss.”
Rounds’ reputation, his great-great-grandson learned, was that of a trusted friend: “If somebody wanted to buy a horse or cow, instead of just giving them their money outright, he’d go with them to make sure they were getting real value. He got quite a name as a trusted person.”
He was also apparently quite refined, every inch the gentleman. He always wore a tie, and he wanted a tablecloth and napkins at every meal. “A lot of the classiness in my family can be directly linked to him,” Hunter says. “The story of this man changed my family forever. Their story was lifted up, and they became quite proud of their heritage.”
“We’re getting younger people in here all the time,” says Ruth Ann Abels Hager, a reference specialist in the Special Collections Department of the St. Louis County Library, the mecca for St. Louis genealogists. “They’re bringing a whole new set of technology skills and enthusiasm.”
A quiet, friendly woman, Hager warmly welcomes visitors to the fifth floor at the library headquarters on Lindbergh. Her domain is more like a balcony, tucked away behind the stacks, but it’s a treasure trove of file cabinets, reference books, microfilm and records visited daily by genealogists and researchers from all over the United States.
“Genealogy is the perfect equalizer,” Hager says. “Every family has a story, and every family’s story is equally important.”
A genealogist—and if you know your parents’ and grandparents’ names and birthdays, you qualify—is a researcher, a librarian, a detective, a journalist, an interviewer, a census-taker, a recordkeeper, a historian, a humorist, a photographer, a documentarian and a treasure hunter. Genealogy is like putting together a puzzle with the pieces all direct links to your past. And it’s not a hobby for the faint of heart: You might find out that Great-Great-Aunt Edith ran a brothel in East St. Louis during the Depression or that your kindly old grandparents had a shotgun wedding a few months before your uncle was born.
Hunter’s passion is helping African Americans find their ancestry. His book Digging for Family Roots: A Beginner’s Guide to African American Genealogical Research can serve as a primer for any family—black or white—beginning its search for ancestors. But by drawing on corporate contacts and friends made during his many years on the St. Louis airwaves, Hunter helped establish the Julius K. Hunter & Friends African American Research Collection at the St. Louis County Library. It’s an expansive holding that includes, among other things, slave records; documents from the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands; black-newspaper archives; and U.S. Colored Troop records. “I am almost ready to proclaim that selection and research center the best in the Midwest,” Hunter says. “My goal is to make it the best in the nation.”
Every February during Saint Louis University’s Black History Month celebration, Hunter holds a “Digging for Roots Day.” Members of the St. Louis Genealogical Society set up computers in the student commons to help African-American students and staff members get started. “We had one custodian here last year find his great-great-grandparents in about half an hour,” Hunter says. “He was thrilled.”
Ann Carter Fleming, certified genealogist, author and past president of the St. Louis Genealogical Society, is one of the researchers sitting at a laptop each year at Hunter’s request. “People are moved to tears by what we are able to find for them,” she says.
Fleming has written three books herself, including The Organized Family Historian: How to File, Manage, and Protect Your Genealogical Research and Heirlooms. So how does she suggest people begin? “Start with your family stories,” Fleming says, “then search for the documents and records to back them up.” Vital records, city directories, census records and other documents are out there for those willing to dig through them. Fleming, a genealogical Sherlock Holmes, says you should look at every successful search as a clue to finding another fact or tidbit about your family. “Start with the known,” she says, “and move to the unknown.”
Beginners can avoid early pitfalls by developing a plan, Fleming adds. Chart your family tree back to your eight great-grandparents, then choose one or two favorite family lines. Don’t try to do too much at once or think that you’re going to have the entire family tree filled out by Christmas.
Next, begin a document search of records such as the U.S. Census and marriage and birth records. The St. Louis Genealogical Society, tucked away at 4 Sunnen Drive in an office park in Maplewood, has resources and people to assist you in your search for documents.
The Internet, of course, has changed everything: Not only can genealogical tools and forms be downloaded, but actual records are available online as well. The St. Louis County Library (www.slcl.org) has more than 1,000 web pages to help users find ancestors. The St. Louis Genealogical Society (www.stlgs.org) is another useful site, with blank genealogy forms to get you started. Websites such as Ancestry.com and Cyndislist.com provide step-by-step links to records, as do the websites of the National Archives (archives.gov/genealogy) and individual state archives. In Missouri, the site is www.sos.mo.gov/archives.
But Fleming warns that the Internet should be used as a jumping-off point, not the final destination. “One of the biggest pitfalls is the assumption that everything you read on your computer screen is the absolute gospel truth,” she says. “You should really try and find the true records. Remember, they are clues.”
And don’t think that genealogy is just a hobby for quiet librarian types or book-worms. Hager says it’s not uncommon for someone to give a shout when a particular piece of information is uncovered. That happened last March, when Hager was able to confirm the gravesite of Harriet Scott, wife of Dred Scott, in Greenwood Cemetery.
“A few years ago,” Hager says, “we had two ladies from California in here who found a piece of information they had been hunting for 10 years. They jumped up and down and squealed with delight.” Hager winced at their reaction, imagining how the other patrons in the library would react. But she needn’t have worried. “The whole floor broke out in applause,” she says.
Says Fleming, “Every family has mysteries”—and so I go searching to solve a mystery of my own, involving my maternal grandparents, William J. Clifford and Helen Groneck. Shortly before she died in 1991, my grandmother casually mentioned that she and my grandfather had sneaked away one night and gotten married in Waterloo, Ill., after which they went back to their respective families and told no one—“but we got married in the church at a few weeks later,” she quickly added. Their wedding anniversary was always celebrated as April 21, 1937.
I set out to verify that story and find myself reading microfilm at the St. Louis County Library one rainy March morning, first checking the marriage records for the years 1937, 1938, 1939 and 1940 in their parish, the old St. Michael’s Catholic Church in North St. Louis.
Nothing.
Written records for three of my grandfather’s brothers are there, but none for my grandfather. With Hager’s help, I check other North St. Louis Catholic churches.
Nothing.
I pore over city and county marriage license records for about a four-year span.
Nothing.
I begin to think that perhaps there’s more to the story than the version I’d always heard. “This is a good exercise,” Hager says with a smile, quickly adding that my grandmother may have been telling the truth. It is possible that if the couple was already legally married, the priest could not record a formal church record.
“Where are you going to go next?” she asks.
I’m going to Waterloo.
Getting Started
“There’s a shred of truth in every family story you hear,” says Ann Carter Fleming, certified genealogist and past president of the St. Louis Genealogical Society. “Start by talking to your relatives,” she says. Fleming and Ruth Ann Abels Hager of the St. Louis County Library offer these six tips for the next holiday gathering or family reunion.
1. Verify the maiden name of every female relative you have.
2. Ask what religion each relative was. Church records are invaluable resources for birth, marriage and death documents.
3. Find the details of any family members’ military experience.
4. Conduct interviews as if you’re a reporter: Where were you born? Where did you live growing up? Where did you go to school? Try to get as many dates and birthdays as the subject remembers, but don’t dwell on facts he or she can’t recall. Do, however, write down every number and date you are told.
5. Ask the oldest living person in your family to tell you everything he or she remembers about the oldest person in the family. “Oral tradition will tell you things that were never written down,” Hager says.
6. Check for clues in the family Bible, on the backs of old photographs and in scrapbooks and high-school yearbooks.
