Oatlands Diary Details Once Lost Descendants

Oatlands Diary Details Once Lost Descendants

Photos by Tiffany Dillon Keane

By Leonard Shapiro

It took some time for Ryan Williams to learn about the illuminating and inspiring history of his family, until he discovered The Oatlands Historic House & Gardens, where many of his descendants were enslaved on the Leesburg property as early as the 1790s.

While attending Penn State in the mid-1990s, he’d done some family research at the National Archives in Washington. After hours of eye-straining microfilm study, he found a census record for his grandfather on his father’s side, several uncles and other relatives who had settled in Arlington.

Ryan Williams is descended from Julius Day, the patriarch of the family and one of the few enslaved people from Oatlands whose lineage can be traced back to the very late 1700s or early 1800s.

Ryan Williams is descended from Julius Day, the patriarch of the family and one of the few enslaved people from Oatlands whose lineage can be traced back to the very late 1700s or early 1800s.

His research was suspended as he completed his degree, then became immersed in a successful journalism career. Five years ago, he began digging into his mother’s side—the Day family—after a great uncle living in Arlington died.

“It got me thinking,” Williams said, adding that he then went to ancestry.com “and dove into the rabbit hole. I found many Days, and names I’d never heard before. Then I discovered they had to be in Loudoun County.”

Next came a Google search and “the first thing that came up was Oatlands and Elizabeth Carter’s diary,” Williams said. Mrs. Carter and her husband George owned Oatlands in the 1800s and the plantation contained the largest enslaved community in Loudoun—133 men, women and children at the outset of the Civil War.

Oatlands now has an interactive website exhibit that also includes a comprehensive database of those working for the Carters from the slavery era, also tracing family roots up to the present. “Reclaim Your Story” Oatlands urges through a program funded with a $12,000 grant from the African-American Cultural Heritage Action Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

When Arlington resident Ryan Williams first contacted Oatlands, he opened his conversation by saying, “I think there’s a good chance my relatives were enslaved at Oatlands.”

He soon visited and began discovering all about the Day family. Last year, he was named to Oatlands’ board of directors and is obviously a huge supporter of its descendants program. Its valuable data base is available to anyone looking to research their own family histories.

Written after slavery had ended, this 1866 entry in the diary says “Julius brought six partridges for me.”

Caleb Schutz, Oatlands’ executive director, would like to attract more African-American families to its treasure trove of information that eventually will be linked to a national data base.

“Recently, there’s been a change in the thinking of the African-American community,” Schutz said. “More people want to learn as much as they can about their families…It’s not always good news. For many, it’s painful. But we think it’s important to continue this work.”

Williams said his own experience was enlightening, especially finding descendants from the 1790s and early 1800s.

“Because of my journalism background, thee’s a part of me that gets excited about discovery,” he said. “I’ve aways been fascinated by history. There’s that connection between the present and the past and what we can learn from it.”

That connection comes to life whenever he’s on Oatlands’ gorgeous grounds.

“There’s something extraordinary about walking onto the land where, not too many generations ago, my family was enslaved,” he said. “Being able to trace a family member’s birth year to the 1790s was a huge discovery. Knowing that one of my relatives was born a slave and then grew up free was revealing.

“He also had enough money to buy property and build a home in Gleedsville (about four miles from Oatlands). That was just as important as anything I discovered. You can see the person you are based on the story of how they lived and survived.”

Williams is still doing family research. He now knows some descendants ended up in Georgetown, in Montgomery County, Maryland and in Philadelphia, where he grew up.

“I’m not done,” he said. “My discoveries opened up a large, broad chapter that’s also helped me educate my family…When you talk to them, you see the light in their eyes because they know how important it is to share all this.”

Important, illuminating, and inspiring.