I’ve always considered myself Latina, since both my parents were born in Colombia before immigrating to the United States in 1963.
But I’ve also known, like many Latinos, that my extended family contains the ethnic diversity reflected throughout the Caribbean and Latin America.
As I’ve begun thinking about the diversity that flows in my veins, Ancestry has proved invaluable in helping me discover facts I’d never known about my family tree, particularly the branch that prides itself on its African American heritage.
Because my father died when I was 2, and my mother died when I was 32, I have to rely on surviving aunts, uncles, and cousins to fill in the many blanks left by being parentless at a young age.
Here are three fascinating facts I learned from Ancestry — and the relationships with relatives I barely spoke to before I was reacquainted with them thanks to Ancestry.
My great-grandfather was a respected pharmacist in Jamaica
Thanks to my second cousin Brian McRae’s research, I discovered that my great-grandfather James McRae, who was of African and East-Indian descent, was educated in England and opened his own pharmacy in Santa Cruz, Jamaica.
He and my great-grandmother Ellen Mullins, who was Irish, had 9 children, including my grandfather Horace James McRae, the only one of their children to eventually move to South America rather than the United States.
My mother’s first cousin was a famous jazz singer
I knew my mom had a “celebrity cousin,” but I didn’t understand why she wasn’t closer to her cousin until I researched the family tree.
One of Horace McRae’s older brothers, Osmond “Ossie” McRae, had grown up in Costa Rica before moving to Harlem in New York City.
There, in 1920, Ossie and his wife, Evadne, who was also Jamaican, had a daughter, Carmen Mercedes McRae.
Carmen would eventually become an important and influential jazz vocalist, recording 60 albums and performing around the world before her death in 1994.
But learning more about my grandfather’s generation helped me realize that if one brother settled in Colombia and another settled in New York, the transportation and communications barriers in the first half of the 20th century made it hard for their families to communicate or visit on a regular basis.
Sure, my mother and aunts knew they had many “Jamaican cousins” who settled in New York, but it hasn’t been until the past few years that Ancestry, email, and social media have enabled me to connect with my second cousins, the grandchildren of the siblings who moved to the United States instead of Colombia.
I even found a ship manifest from 1926 that makes it clear that at age 6, Carmen traveled to and from her parents’ hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, presumably to visit her relatives.
My mother’s first cousin and his children helped win equality for African Americans
My grandfather Horace had another younger brother, Ivan McRae Sr., who settled in Yonkers, just north of New York City.
There, he became president of the Yonkers chapter of the NAACP and attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous March on Washington on August 28, 1963.
Both of Ivan’s sons had joined the Army during World War II, where they witnessed, and helped overcome, the effects of racism.
Ivan’s son Keith served with a segregated, all-black Army regiment. They had the grim task of guarding a Japanese internment camp, where the United States had forced Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants to live during the war.
Another of Ivan’s sons, Ivan Jr., flew with the famed Tuskegee Airmen, the first military unit to train African Americans as fighter and bomber pilots.
Their courage and determination in battle showed the country the importance of integrating the armed forces.
Ancestry helped me learn about my family’s important place in history. What will you find?
– Sandie Angulo Chen