ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’m not quite of the age to directly remember President John F. Kennedy (although my mother would remind me that after his assassination when I was 3 years old and some months, she brought me out to the television to see Lee Harvey Oswald … just in time for Jack Ruby to shoot him!).

But now I know what Kennedy was talking about when opened a 1961 news conference by saying, “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.”

That’s because earlier this month I went with my girlfriend Katy Bodenhorn, the genealogy director for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, to New York City for her nationwide TV appearance on “The Tamron Hall Show.”

As part of HSP’s 200^th anniversary, its marketing firm had reached out in many directions to help publicize the organization’s milestone. One of those directions was see if Tamron Hall would be interested in having her African-American ancestry researched.

After initially declining, Hall’s staff convinced her and Bodenhorn got to work, including a trip to Austin, Texas, to research additional sources from Hall’s home state.

She found and analyzed a number of tidbits that were of great significance to Hall—such as the value of personal property her mother’s ancestors possessed soon after freedom from enslavement and that they worked with their hands in agriculture—as well as extending her ancestry and documenting a surname change of one of her families.

Not only did she document that surname change—a formerly enslaved man Tobias McKeller became known as McPherson—but she was able to deduce the likely reason for the change as well as where it came from.

“Because there were slaveholding McKellers in Tobias’s immediate vicinity in Texas, it’s likely they were the enslavers,” Bodenhorn said. “And the McKellers came from Cumberland County, North Carolina, where they owned thousands of acres of land on a McPherson Creek.” Bodenhorn speculates that Tobias might have had better memories of the land in North Carolina, which censuses document as his birthplace, rather than of the enslaving family.

The episode including Bodenhorn’s segments can be found at the URL, https://tamronhallshow.com/episodes/thursday-5-2-24

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And while I’m doing some name dropping of famous people, I was also joking with Bodenhorn about the “A Star Is Born” aspect of our relationship.

While she might lean toward the latest remake of that movie—who could resist being compared to Lady Gaga?—and I like James Mason’s classy portrayal in the 1950s version, don’t anybody dare slot us into the campy 1976 remake with Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand that was a box office success but critically “meh” film!