Retired teacher's passion is researching her roots Tuesday, September 06, 2005 By Bob Batz Jr., Pittsburgh Post-Gazette LaVerne Hunter has done extensive research on her genealogy. Next to her is a picture of her parents, Eunice Conway Nichols and John Nathaniel Nichols. History used to make her fall asleep. Now it makes LaVerne Hunter literally tremble with excitement. Especially when, as she puts it, "it's personal." That is, when the history is hers and that of her family. She still can vividly recount how she felt when, while tracking down one of her great-grandfather's brothers, she cold-called and questioned a "Booker T." in Philadelphia who turned out to be related to him -- a direct hit. As she recounts, "I started to foam at the mouth. I shouted! I whooped! I felt like Alex Haley," the author of "Roots." Researching her roots has become her passion. "It's putting flesh on the bones." She encourages others to join her, something she'll be doing Saturday when a group to which she belongs, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, puts on a program with the Western Pennsylvania Genealogical Society, titled "Finding African-American Ancestors." "So many African-Americans don't know their history," says Hunter, a retired math teacher in Penn Hills, who thinks it's especially important for children to know where they're from. She gets frustrated at how some friends don't even know who their grandparents are. She knows that African-Americans can face special challenges inknowing their family histories, but they also can reap very special rewards. Consider her family tree, which took root on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where her parents were born and raised. She has traced it back to a slave who escaped from Mississippi, only to be "sold down the river" again before fighting in the Civil War -- one of two great-great grandfathers to serve in the war. She's traced it to a Cleveland aunt who "cooked a cat" -- one that had crawled into her oven. Hunter is blessed in that her parents are still living and her dad is a storyteller who has regaled her with oral history over the years. She's lucky, too, that she's the kind of person who has always written things down. "Finding African-American Ancestors" When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. Where: Homewood branch, Carnegie Library, 7101 Hamilton Ave. Admission: Free, but you must preregister by calling 412-622-3154. For more information: 412-687-6811. The speaker: Washington, D.C.-area genealogist Char McCargo Bah last year used old city directories to determine that a German man for whom she was doing research shares a great-uncle with her -- they're cousins. As chronicled in a story in the Free Lance-Star newspaper of Fredericksburg, Va., the man, Harald Stoelting, was a "Brown Baby," one of many offspring of black U.S. soldiers and German mothers after World War II. Also coming up: Annual Genealogy Seminar, noon to 4 p.m. Nov. 5 at the Carnegie Library in East Liberty, featuring Aletha Solomon, whose book "From The Rising of The Sun ... The Genealogy and Family Tree of the Sphinx Family" chronicles the lives of more than 2,500 family members, beginning in Mississippi in 1815. Guests must register for this session at 412-243-5423. But it's only in recent years that she's worked to document everything by sleuthing through government records and other archives and working resources on the Internet. From her experience, she can offer plenty of advice. Some is general, such as: Talk to all your aging relations before it's too late, and keep lots of notes. Some is specific: When looking up names of slaves or their descendants, remember that some didn't take their masters' last names, or spelled them differently, so also search for phonetic variants. If you can't find a certain relative, find and talk to the people whose families lived next door. "You have to be a good investigator," she says. "Be curious. Be nosy." Because Census records listed only free blacks, not slaves, before 1870, that year may be a brick wall to going any further back. Hunter can trace one of her lines back to 1840, suggesting to her that they were "free-born" blacks who may have come from Africa as indentured servants rather than slaves. Last year, she paid for her mother and her mother's brother to take DNA tests through a company called African Ancestry (<http://www.AfricanAncestry.com>www.AfricanAncestry.com). On a display board that she will bring Saturday are certificates saying that her mother's side shares genetic ancestry with the Ewondo people from Cameroon and the Temne people of Sierra Leone. Hunter also had her father take the test, and results showed he shares maternal genetic ancestry with the Yoruba and Hausa people in Nigeria, as well as paternal genetic ancestry of European origin -- possibly going back to a slave owner. Such results aren't conclusive, and are in fact controversial with some, but Hunter believes the clues are as good as are scientifically possible now, and well worth the $1,200 total she paid for them -- especially since she now has an idea that her roots are more geographically specific than just the entire continent of Africa. "I was elated," she says. "It's like [being] a child who's been adopted and finding out who your birth parents are. It's like a hole in your soul is filled." She still has a lot of holes to fill. This family griot (storyteller/historian), as some relatives call her, wants to determine if her parents, who grew up in a stable African-American community, might actually be distant cousins. She wants to try to trace some of her relatives back beyond 1870 and perhaps even back to Africa. She also plans to compile her research into "something to give to my children," perhaps a book. "I love the past so much," she says, and just talking about it makes her tremble. ---------- (Bob Batz Jr. can be reached at <mailto:[email protected]>[email protected] or 412-263-1930.)