A stunning find in his family tree: The Bushes’ ancestors enslaved his relatives
“It was the coming together of things that I had been looking for for years,” Charles Holman said.
Charles Holman had been researching his family tree for more than half a century when he stumbled upon a piece of information that left him slack-jawed.
Holman, 66 and African American, had spent much of his life collecting loose threads — stories passed down through the generations, birth and death certificates, centuries-old bills of sale, Census Bureau records, and DNA matches. His training as a lawyer had taught him to be thorough, and his gentle manner had won over strangers through letters and emails and in person. He had connected with distant relatives both Black and White, who had helped him weave a family tapestry that mirrored America’s complicated and fraught racial history.
Along the way, he had attended a gathering of White relatives who shared his name and whose ancestors had enslaved his. He had visited the sites of three plantations where his forebears had toiled without recompense. He had stood in cramped quarters where some of his enslaved ancestors had probably lived, trying to sense the spirit of those who had slept there.
The discoveries had changed the way Holman saw himself, his family and his place in American history.
Do-it-yourself genealogical research like Holman’s is a popular pastime for many Americans. But for those whose ancestors were enslaved, the task is made difficult, if not impossible, by recordkeeping that often consists of only a first name scribbled in a property ledger.
Holman has had “more success than most,” said CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist who has worked with him.
Then a couple of years ago, working in his study in Maryland, Holman says he came upon a Kentucky newspaper article from 1992 about a family whose ranks then included one U.S. president and soon would add another. The article identified ancestors of then-President George H.W. Bush dating to before the American Revolution, and Holman recognized the names of Bush’s great-great-grandmother and her parents. They matched names on deeds and inheritance records Holman had already found.
The Bushes’ ancestors, Holman says he realized, had enslaved his own.
“It was the coming together of things that I had been looking for for years,” he said.
Holman had received warm receptions from some other White families he had found in his research, and each meeting had left him feeling “a high of the greatest order.”
Perhaps, he thought, members of the former first family would be willing to meet with him as well. Nervous and excited, he sat down to write to them. He knew it was unlikely the Bushes would respond, but he would never forgive himself for not trying.
Holman’s passion for family genealogy started in 1968, when his fifth-grade teacher in Lansing, Mich., gave an assignment: “Go home and ask who your ancestors were before coming to the United States.” The next day, one student stood up and said his family had come from France to seek their fortune; another spoke of relatives arriving around the time of the Mayflower.
Holman, the only Black student in the class, had nothing to share. His ancestors had been enslaved, and his parents didn’t know the details.
“I felt a little bit like the kid who comes to school without lunch money and has to watch the other kids eating all this great food,” Holman said.
The teacher’s question, and Holman’s inability to answer it, made him determined to construct the kind of family history for himself that many White Americans take for granted.
Black Americans often hit a wall when trying to chronicle more than three or four generations of family history, said Briayna Cuffie, co-founder of Reparations 4 Slavery, a website that provides information on racism and reparations. Records of ancestors before the 1870 Census, the first decennial count after slavery was abolished, are difficult to find, she said. Enslaved people often didn’t have surnames and didn’t always show up in wills and estate documents.
“Black people have to piece together where they were and who they came from, whereas a lot of White people always had that information,” Cuffie said.
Holman also encountered another common stumbling block: resistance from family elders to speaking of a painful period in history. His father and stepfather helped fill in some information, but others didn’t want to talk about the past. Some only vaguely recalled stories passed down by long-dead grandparents.
Holman’s grandfather initially resisted sharing that his own grandfather had been a White enslaver. “He didn’t want to let that out,” he said.
He knew his maternal great-grandfather, Moses Clark, had been enslaved, but his mother was born after Clark died, and she and her seven siblings hadn’t asked their elders many questions about slavery. Holman learned that a 1911 book titled “Beacon Lights of the Race” mentioned Clark, but the pages about him were missing in his aunt’s copy.
But he didn’t give up. In 1973, at 16, he sat in the front row for a lecture in his hometown by the author Alex Haley, who spoke of a book he was working on called “Roots” and gave tips on researching African American genealogy.
While attending the University of Michigan, Holman rode a Greyhound bus to Jackson, Mich., to visit his father’s parents, who told him about his great-great-grandmother, America Granderson Thomas. Holman learned that as a young enslaved woman in the 1850s, she escaped Kentucky by boarding a train disguised as a White woman in mourning, her features obscured by a sunbonnet and a heavy veil. The Quakers helping her had warned her to speak to no one so her cadences wouldn’t give her away; when a man on the train tried to chat, she answered in clipped yeses and noes.
As Holman uncovered more such stories, his hunger grew. One night, studying in a university library, he found an intact copy of “Beacon Lights of the Race,” which said his mother’s grandfather, Moses Clark, had been enslaved in Arkansas and freed in 1862 by U.S. Gen. Samuel Curtis after a Civil War battle there. The book included a photograph of Clark.
As a child, Holman had seen the portrait on the wall of his grandmother’s home and been frightened of the stern face at the top of the stairs. Now, he read about Clark’s life as an enslaved man, how he had been trained as a barber and went on to become a lawyer, magistrate, justice of the peace, Masonic leader and newspaper editor.
He checked out the book and called his parents with the news. “From that moment on, I changed my mind about becoming a dentist and decided to study law,” he said. “It literally changed the course of my life.”
Not everyone was helpful. In 1985, Holman, now a young lawyer, visited South Carolina and found the names of ancestors who had been enslaved by a White family who shared his surname. After adding his name to a roster at the South Carolina Historical Society, he was contacted by a Holman in Georgia. Were they related, the man wanted to know. They were. “My ancestors were enslaved by our mutual ancestors,” Holman recalled telling him. “That man dropped me like a potato.”
Others surprised him with kindness. In 1995, after learning that some ancestors had been enslaved on a plantation near Harrodsburg, Ky., he contacted its caretaker, who invited Holman to visit the remains of the original plantation. He saw stones in the graveyard, some whose names had worn away, some just rocks no one had bothered to engrave.
A week or two later the property’s owner, Cincinnati philanthropist Ralph Anderson, asked Holman to return. Anderson and his wife, Ruth, who have since died, had restored the mansion along with several nearby plantations they began purchasing in the 1960s. They invited Holman to stay in the mansion, but on the first night he chose to sleep in the guesthouse, to be closer to where his family had been.
“The caretaker gave me one of the bricks of the old house from the 1700s and some nails,” he said. “I would have taken that over a million dollars, just to have something tangible that went back to the time of my ancestors.”
He came away energized. What else from his family’s lost history, he wondered, might he unearth?
After taking a DNA test through Ancestry.com, Holman found another White relative: Larry Holman, a retired engineer of Vicksburg, Miss. The two spoke and confirmed they had a common ancestor and belonged on the same family tree.
“There’s no doubting it, so why not accept it?” Larry, 73, said in an interview.
In 2015, Larry invited Charles Holman to a gathering near Blackville, S.C., where family members planned to unveil a historic marker to a bridge that Larry and Charles’s common ancestor, John Holman, had built in the early 1800s. John Holman was Charles’s great-great-great-grandfather, referred to as a third-great-grandfather; he was Larry’s fourth-great-grandfather.
Charles Holman hesitated. A few months earlier, a white supremacist had killed nine Black churchgoers in a Charleston church known for its civil rights organizing. Would Holman be safe, on a rural patch of land surrounded by White Southerners who might resent learning of their blood ties to an African American stranger?
But each leap Holman had taken on his research journey had brought him closer to answering his teacher’s question, and his own. He got in his car and drove.
On a dusty South Carolina road near the site where the bridge had been, he stood among 60 or so White people. One man was wearing a T-shirt with a Confederate flag on it, and a woman, unrelated to the Holmans, invited the group to sing “Dixie.”
This was land where his ancestors had been enslaved until federal troops burned the plantation house in February 1865, Holman said he had learned.
Larry Holman stepped up to address the group. Everyone should take a DNA test, he told the gathered family. Then he introduced Charles Holman as his cousin.
“It was not a secret when I was a child” that their family had Black relatives, though they seldom spoke of it, said Lynn Teague, 75, a retired archaeologist, who was among those at the gathering.
“While most people were not anything you’d call effusive, I think people were very glad to see him [Charles Holman], because I think there is a long-standing underlying feeling with a lot of people that this is a fracture that they would rather see healed,” she said.
Over the next few years, Holman took more DNA tests and found more relatives. He took courses on genetic genealogy and worked with Moore, a DNA expert on “Finding Your Roots,” Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS series about researching one’s family tree, to confirm his findings. This type of research has become more common, Moore said, but she called Holman a “pioneer” among Black Americans researching their family lines to before the Civil War.
Through estate records and Civil War soldier pension records, Holman tracked down a man in Brooks, Ky., whose ancestors had enslaved his. The man, Michael Robison, sent Holman copies of records he had found in his late grandmother’s trunk.
Reading them chilled Holman. There was an 1817 bill of sale for the purchase of his third-great-grandfather Darby Granderson. A trader had been hired to take Granderson and other enslaved people from Kentucky to Louisiana to be sold. They wore ragged clothes and no shoes; a pregnant woman died along the way, the documents showed.
Robison, 70, still remembers how his great-grandparents remained bitter about the Civil War’s outcome and the end of slavery. “They were of that generation that could not get by it,” he said.
He invited Holman to visit, and they toured the plantation, still owned by a relative of Robison’s, where, according to the bill of sale from the trunk, Robison’s ancestors had enslaved his. Holman took photos standing in the narrow doorway of a one-room brick structure that may have housed his relatives. Connecting with Holman felt, Robison told The Washington Post, like a way to start atoning.
Then, in April 2022, Holman received a trove of documents from the Filson Historical Society in Louisville about an enslaver named Peter G. Foree, a physician and large landowner in Anchorage, Ky.
He had already seen Foree’s estate inventory, which included Holman’s third-great-grandfather Robert Thomas; his wife, Winny; and some of their children. One of their children was Holman’s great-great-grandfather Robert Anderson Thomas, and DNA tests had confirmed Holman’s relationship with descendants of two more, including Robert Anderson Thomas’s sister, Susan, who was moved out of state when she was 6 years old and never saw her parents again.
Then he opened a file that included a 1992 article from the Kentucky Advocate. The headline read, “President George Bush has Kentucky connections.”
Holman welled up with excitement as he read about George Herbert Walker Bush’s ancestors who had moved from Virginia to Kentucky in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Among the president’s direct ancestors were Peter G. Foree and his daughter Lucretia Green Foree Holliday.
To Holman, it felt like a breakthrough.
“It was one of the greatest moments in my life,” he said.
According to Charles Holman’s research,
members of the Foree family, George W. Bush
and George H.W. Bush’s ancestors, enslaved
members of the Thomas family,
Holman’s ancestors.
Elizabeth G.
Dawson
John James
Holliday
Lucretia
Green Foree
America
Granderson
Robert Anderson
Thomas
James Hutchenson
Wear
Nancy Eliza
Holliday
John W.
Belford
George Herbert
Walker
Charles F.
Holman Sr.
Prescott Sheldon
Bush Sr.
Charles F.
Holman Jr.
George H.W.
Bush
Barbara J.
Pierce
Charles F.
Holman III
Sources: Ancestry.com, Charles Holman research
CHIQUI ESTEBAN/THE WASHINGTON POST
The lineage of one of America’s most accomplished political dynasties dates back to colonial times and includes some well-known enslavers. The most notorious stories center on Thomas Walker, George H.W. Bush’s third-great-grandfather, who was associated with at least 11 slaving voyages to West Africa, according to various news reports.
The Post was unable to find instances of the Bush family directly addressing their ancestors’ connection to slavery, and members of the Bush family and their representatives didn’t respond to multiple letters, emails and phone calls from The Post about Holman or their ancestors’ relationship to slavery.
The Post reached a Bush family friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss a private conversation. That friend said they spoke with a member of the Bush family about The Post’s inquiries. The family member referred questions to a 2023 statement on the topic given to another news outlet, the family friend said.
Responding to a Reuters investigation last year into the slaveholding past of U.S. political elites that connected George W. Bush to Peter G. Foree, the former president’s chief of staff said in a statement: “As President Bush said at the dedication of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, ‘A great Nation does not hide its history; it faces its flaws and corrects them.’”
Katharine O’Connell, a forensic genealogist whom The Post contacted to review Holman’s research, said her independent investigation corroborated his findings that the Bushes’ ancestors owned his, by tracing the Bush family line through census records and other documents, including the Peter G. Foree estate inventory.
Considering how hard it can be for African Americans to trace their family roots to pre-Civil War times, she said, “I think the fact that he was able to put this together was pretty amazing.”
After making his findings, Holman sent letters to George W. Bush; Jeb Bush; Laura Bush, who is listed as a member of the Museum Council of the National Museum of African American History and Culture; and Jenna Bush Hager, co-host of “Today With Hoda & Jenna,” which has featured the series “Finding Your Roots.”
But Holman said he hasn’t received any replies.
His cousin Laura Ingersol, a retired Baltimore pastor, also wrote to George W. Bush in January 2023, asking for material related to their families’ intersecting history. “Learning as much as we can about our ancestors helps us to understand some of the stories passed down through our family and ultimately, something about our own character,” she wrote.
She received a response from his chief of staff, Freddy Ford, that was cordial but unambiguous: “Unfortunately, our office doesn’t possess any ancestral records or have access to any materials about the families you mention. Therefore, we regret that we can’t be of assistance.” Ford didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.
Holman says he hasn’t given up.
In February, he visited the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives in Frankfort, where he found an 1847 document depicting the fracturing of his family, when his third-great-grandparents Winny and Robert and their children were divided up among Peter G. Foree’s widow and children.
As he read the 19th-century curlicue calligraphy, his heart pounded.
“Negro Boy, James, valued at $550” and “Negro Girl, Susan, valued at $250” were bequeathed to Lucretia, one of Foree’s daughters. Another daughter, Eliza, inherited “Negro Boy, Anderson, valued at $500.” That was Robert Anderson Thomas, Holman’s great-great-grandfather. Foree’s widow got Holman’s third-great-grandparents: “Bob,” valued at $400, and “Negro Woman Winny and her Child Cucinda” for whom no value was assigned, “the Woman being diseased and likely to be a charge.”
Holman then drove to Anchorage, an affluent Louisville suburb where the old Foree residence still stands. He strained to feel some connection to this spot where his great-great-grandfather Robert Anderson Thomas, born into slavery in 1833, had grown up.
“That window in the old house could have been, or maybe wasn’t, where my great-great-great-grandmother Winny was when she was the cook,” he said.
Holman also recently tracked down his fifth-grade teacher, Tamara Lobsinger, now 83, and gave her a call.
When she had given the fifth-grade class assignment, he told her, “I didn’t have anything to say. So I’ve spent the rest of my life [finding] out who these ancestors were, and I have to tell you that after all these years I’ve fully completed the assignment. I wanted, above all, to say thank you.”
When he hung up the phone, he felt a sense of peace, he said. “I just sat in my leather recliner for a good 30 minutes, just soaking it in.”
After multiple attempts to reach the Bushes, Holman says he realizes he may never hear from them. But he treasures the connections with the people who have responded, and the stories he has heard about ancestors he never knew.
One of his favorites, told by his grandmother, is a childhood escapade of Robert Anderson Thomas, who was owned as a little boy by Peter G. Foree, George H.W. Bush’s fourth-great-grandfather, according to Holman and O’Connell’s research.
“The story was that [Robert Anderson Thomas’s mother, Winny] made some cherry pies for the enslaver’s wife, George Bush’s ancestor, and she put the cherry pies on the windowsill to cool. And Robert Anderson Thomas, my great-great-grandfather, saw the pies, could smell them, but knew he would never be able to have a taste of it. They were pies for George Bush’s ancestor, but he was a child and he couldn’t resist. And so he devised an idea that if he could take a straw to the top of the pie, he could suck out the juice and savor some of the pie’s flavor, which he did. And he was undetected. But later, when his mother was serving pies to George Bush’s ancestors, the slaveholder’s wife ... remarked that these were the driest cherry pies she had ever eaten. And he thought it was so funny that decades later, well after he’d escaped and slavery had long been over, he told this story to my grandmother.”
Holman smiled. “I can’t tell the story like she told it, and I’m sure she couldn’t tell it as funny as he could. But 50 years after [her grandfather] was dead, my grandmother still remembered that story.”
It’s a tale, he said, he would love to share with the Bush family.
Story editing by Ryan Bacic and Renae Merle. Julie Zauzmer Weil, Magda Jean-Louis and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Copy editing by Anne Kenderdine and Shay Quillen."
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