By Nick McNamara/WHRO
William & Mary’s Lemon Project helps African Americans in Williamsburg uncover their families’ histories and the role their relatives played in shaping the college, the city and the landscape of the early United States.
On Thursday morning, the Lemon Project is taking its services to the college’s Juneteenth Celebration in the Sadler Center.
“It resonates deeply if you have been told for generations that you did not make a substantive contribution to the building of a nation and now you have records that say ‘Yes, I did, I did build this place,’” said Jajuan Johnson, interim director of the Lemon Project. “We think that they’re worth the search, they’re worth the labor.”
The Lemon Project was created in 2009 to investigate William & Mary’s ties to slavery, starting with its founding in 1693. The college’s historic campus was built by enslaved people, and its founding president, James Blair, was instrumental in the institutionalization of slavery in Colonial Virginia.
The project was inspired by similar work at Brown University and pushed forward with advocacy by faculty and students such as Tiseme Zegeye, who in 2007 proposed a resolution in the Student Assembly that called on William & Mary to research and publicize the college’s role in slavery and create a memorial to the enslaved. The Board of Visitors agreed in 2009. “Hearth: Memorial to the Enslaved” was dedicated in 2022.
“We wouldn’t be here without students; they are key to our success,” said Sarah Thomas, associate director of the Lemon Project.
Johnson helped establish the project’s public genealogical research work about five years ago. Members of the Descendant community, African Americans with roots in Williamsburg’s earliest days, had been asking for it for years.
A $1 million grant created a foundation to get started during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“People were wanting to connect,” Johnson said. “They are in place, sheltered and they’re wanting to connect with family.”
Interest in genealogy predated the pandemic, Johnson said, but as historical records were digitized and made available online, it became easier for Black people to investigate unanswered questions about their lineage.
For people who descend from enslaved people, however, ancestry work can be difficult. Many records were lost or destroyed during the Civil War. In other cases, records pertaining to the enslaved were sparse or nonexistent, sometimes noting the presence of an enslaved worker but not their name.
“Slavery was injustice against family lines,” Johnson said. “So much is not recorded because you were considered property.”
Despite the challenges, many records do exist in William & Mary’s Swem Library special collections. The Lemon Project also makes use of Library of Virginia records and Freedmen’s Bureau records, which Johnson said have been instrumental in their work.
“Although people are told that they can’t find anything prior to 1865, I would say 80% of the time they do, they find some type of clue,” Johnson said.
The Lemon Project collaborates on genealogy work with other groups, including the Bray School Lab, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society of Hampton Roads and Black residents, Johnson said. Where institutional records fell short, records from historical church congregations in Williamsburg, such as First Baptist Church, Oak Grove Baptist Church and Bruton Parish, sometimes provide new leads.
“African American cemeteries and the structures as well are major testimonies of African American life and history and family history in this region,” Johnson said. “These are places that are repositories of information that tell the story of people and the communities they built.”
The project doesn’t always start in the distant past and move forward. Using a mix of oral history, death certificates and payroll documents from the 1900s at the college, Johnson said, the project was able to follow lineages backward.
“We see that not only are these people in the early 1900s on this payroll list working at William & Mary, but they have children who are working at the college,” Johnson said. “We can trace back to find that there was this labor lineage at the college.”
Thomas said the project’s work builds community and connects people.
“We had a genealogy roundtable and cousins met each other for the first time,” Thomas said. “We didn’t plan it, it just happened; those kinds of stories are priceless.”
Those moments and demonstrating the Black community’s role in building early Williamsburg and overcoming oppression make the project’s work resonate with people, Johnson said.
“They built the churches, they cared for their dead, they reproduced, they established businesses, they did everything that people have told them — that institutions have told them — they did not do,” he said. “It’s sustaining when you consistently live in a world that tells you you don’t matter, it reaffirms ‘No, this is my place; this, too, is my nation; this is my institution.’”
