Genealogy for Black people in the U.S. is notoriously difficult due to myriad issues. But for one family in Southern California, their search for their past was made easier — through an heirloom bible.
In the late 1980s, the Diggs family of Southern California came across a family Bible with an incredible backstory. Notes written in the margin documented their family history to an enslaved ancestor who learned to read and write — rare at the time. The Diggs eventually donated their heirloom to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., where it’s now on display. Historians say artifacts like the Bible are rare and offer a valuable portrait into legacy and resistance.
Read the full transcript here.
Host: L.A. Times Washington D.C. reporter Erin B. Logan
More reading:
How a Black family’s Bible ended up at the Smithsonian Institution
Black genealogists get help tracing their roots
Behind these names, you’ll find stories of L.A.’s Black history
Gustavo intro: Hey what's up? It’s Gustavo Arellano.Today, we're turning over the mic to one of my awesome LA Times colleagues. Erin Logan covers national politics in the DC bureau and brings us a story of a family’s heirloom… and how it made its way to the Smithsonian.
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EL: When I was in grade school, I envied my classmates who would go on tangents about their family tree.
Their ancestors came to America from Europe, Asia and other places around the world.
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They had pictures, birth records, and family heirlooms.
All I could offer is that I came from sharecroppers from the Deep South. And they were enslaved on plantations in Mississippi and Alabama. And then before that, they came to America in shackles and on slave ships.
Beyond that, I don’t know their names or even where in Africa they came from.
It’s all a black hole.
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That’s a common experience for the descendents of enslaved Americans like me.
Our family history was taken from us through kidnapping, family separation and violence.
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So when I learned about the story of the Diggs family, I was intrigued.
This is their journey.
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We are walking through the lobby. It's very fun. Very clean, clear.
In April, I met Denise Diggs at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.
Did she say follow her? Or did she say wait here? Oh…
We were in search of her family’s artifact.
DD: This here is our family Bible. It's in the basement. It's in the slavery section.
TOURIST: Really?
DD: Yeah. That's why we're here with her. She's a reporter.
TOURIST: Really?
Denise, a retired civilian jail manager from San Bernardino, was on a mission — to find a Bible once owned by her family’s patriarch:
His name is Richard Collins. He was born into slavery in 1844 in Alabama.
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The Diggs family donated the Bible to the Smithsonian institute in 2014.
Archivists deemed it an object of historical significance.
It's now part of an exhibit, humanizing the experiences of enslaved people and the importance faith played in their lives.
Denise proudly told other tourists why we were at the museum.
TOURIST: when they did the open call. You guys gave it to them?
DD: Yeah.
TOURIST: that was so good. It was amazing. You still had it?
DD: Yes, it was.
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SOUNDS FROM MUSEUM
ERIN: We are getting off the elevator…
We walked into the exhibition and began weaving in and out of visitors.
We saw remnants of a slave ship, a wrought iron slave collar and a towering, six-foot statue of President Thomas Jefferson standing in front of a wall of stacked bricks… memorializing the hundreds of humans he owned.
ERIN: I'm almost positive. It's on the other side of the wall. So you got to go over there…. We make our way over here.
A few steps down the hall, we found what we were looking for.
EXHIBIT SOUND: excuse me, but I reconciled just told us about God.
We heard recordings explaining how enslaved people lived. We saw the instruments used by a white doctor who used Black women’s bodies for medical experiments.
That’s when we saw the Collin’s family bible.
It was opened to the Book of Exodus. which recounts the story of Hebrew slaves in Egypt. and how they escaped.
EL AND DD: Oh, my goodness.
Are you feeling excited and nervous?
Yeah, I knew that I was going to feel something. Maybe you get a little emotional. No, cause I'm fine. I think I would cry. I'm usually tougher than that, but anyway…
MUSIC TRANSITION
The Diggs family first came across the Bible in the late 1980s.
It was Denise’s sister in law Carlotta who foraged through the cardboard box of books, earmarked charity, looking for something to read.
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Halfway into the pile, she found the dusty and worn Bible.
CD: So I went back there and I pulled up a chair and I’m going through all of these books. And then I see this one, it says, holy Bible. So I opened it up. And as I'm thumbing through the pages, I start noticing all of these names and dates and births and marriages. And I'm like, wait a minute. This is something that we really need to take a look at.
The notes said things like; "Richard Collins Jr. Born in Dallas County. Alabama
And: "Virginia J. Collins to Morgan T. White—Aug. 24, 1892"
So it's not like, you know, the 1950s or forties where someone was just writing in a Bible. This is slavery dates that I was looking at. So I was like amazed. Amazed. Like I said, it just hit me.
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Carlotta showed the Bible to her mother-in-law, Natalie Diggs, who said it had belonged to Richard Collins, her grandfather.
When Natalie inspected the notes, she recognized the names of her father and his siblings.
Natalie, spent the next couple of decades using the Bible’s notes as a guide in an effort to build her family tree.
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But...she hadn’t made much progress by the time she died in 2005.
Other members of the family then picked up the search…led by one of her sons, Richard.
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The story of how they picked up the missing pieces…is coming up after this break.
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<
DD: This is my mother and her seven sisters, six sisters. There were seven girls. This is Joanne, my aunt.
In late April, I traveled to California’s San Bernadino County where I met Denise Diggs and her older brother Richard.
Since their mother Natalie’s death, Richard had taken the role in deciphering the ancestral clues left in his great grandfather’s bible.
I asked him how he felt when he first read the notes and markings left in the Bible.
RC: At first it was just kinda shocking. A part of me was like so glad that we could find something that attached us to the history of our family. But curious…I have a little bit of an investigative mind; law enforcement for 30 years.
Richard said he spent years trying to match family rumors with his great grandfather’s notes.
A clear vision of his great grandfather started coming to life...
RC: I know him. If he walked in this room today, I'd known him. I knew him by his demeanor. I known him by his speech. I knew him because I know so much about him and what's happened to him.
But it wasn’t always easy.
The Bible contained names and dates and markings on certain passages.
Some of it was clear cut. But some of it was confusing. Leading Richard to wonder…what was going on in his ancestor’s mind?
RD: So like, this is mark, this is Matthew, right. 19 and 20. He, he puts a mark there and I'm like, why did he put that mark there? What was he thinking when he did that, man?
Sometimes, the head scratching led to pretty amusing discoveries.
For years, I kept looking at this going, what the heck is this? But a bunch of scribbling. And then I realized when you turn it upside down, it was Hattie, his second little daughter, Hattie Collins. She was practicing her “H’s” on that page.
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Richard Diggs kept at it.
His research led him to believe that Richard Collins’ grandmother lived as a free woman in Georgia before she and her daughter were kidnapped in 1818 and sold into slavery on an Alabama plantation.
Collins wrote in the Bible that he was born in 1844 into slavery on a plantation and that at 16 had a son out of wedlock.
Diggs believes that his ancestor escaped slavery and enlisted in the Union army.
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After the Confederacy fell, Collins married and reunited with his mother and grandmother in Alabama. When the union army ended its occupation of the south and unchecked white supremacist violence became more pervasive in Alabama, Collins fled to Texas where he had more children, accumulated some wealth and became a Cryptic Mason.
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At some point, he moved to Southern California and later he died in 1918.
He was buried in San Diego.
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Despite all of this digging, Richard Diggs still has a lot of unanswered questions.
You know, why did he wind up in Texas? And why did he come to California? And then when he got to California, why did he spend some time in Bakersfield? Sometime in Imperial valley, sometime in San Diego, what was going on?
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Yet, despite all the missing parts, historians say the family’s ability to piece together their family tree is rare.
Records before 1870 are scarce.
African Americans are often left with little to no knowledge of their ancestors’ origins or how they lived.
BS: “It is not particularly common for African American families to find artifacts from the era of enslavement.”
That’s Brenda Stevenson, a historian at the University of California, Los Angeles.
BS: Most of those documents that describe in some kind of way their lives with their family and a family membership were actually produced by those persons who called them their slave. Who might have recorded the birth dates, um, the names, the parents sometimes have their, what they consider their slave property.
Stevenson told me that enslaved people in this ethnic group were deemed property in much of the country until the end of the Civil War in 1865.
She said that the federal government did not include their names until its 1870 census.
That lack of documentation and other racist policies yielded empty branches on family trees.
And that’s what made the Digg’s family bible so rare.
Richard Collins had documented five generations of births, deaths and marriages.
His neat script provided the clues necessary for his ancestors to trace their lineage back to the shores of Africa. A rare feat for most African Americans.
BS: Most people can probably find with a lot of hard work links to \ the last generations of persons who were enslaved, those // people who could get to the point of, you know, before those three or four generations before emancipation, there was a very, very blessed and lucky people because it's very hard to do so unless they remain.The same area, unless the people who claim them as their slaves kept copious records and those records have now their place in the archive. It's, they're very difficult to do.
There was another factor in the Diggs family bible that made its existence even more remarkable: How did the senior Richard Collins learn to read and write?
It was against the law for most enslaved black people to be able to read or to write.
According to Stevenson, literacy among enslaved people was outlawed throughout much of the Deep South after Nat Turner’s failed rebellion in 1831.
By some estimates, just 10 percent of enslaved people were literate.
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So..the Diggs family was lucky to have so much information because of the notes left behind in the bible.
But eventually...Richard hit a dead end.
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RD: Okay. So this is what they told me.
So he turned to modern technology…
Then I have a paternal ancient paternal linens with payroll Ramses.
He took a DNA test.
The third because of this is in my DNA, E V E the SB 38.Don't ask me what that is…
What he found... astonished him.
Nearly 13 percent of the Diggs’ DNA hails from the Congo and Angola. The first Africans who landed in Jamestown in 1619 were indentured servants from Angola.
And he thinks his ancestors were among them.
And there are other things that kind of support that by the way. Okay. So, so now we're in America it is 1619. These people are not put into a slave system because there's no child slavery and colonial law at the time in 1619, that came much later.
Whereas African-Americans are descendants of Africans who were kidnapped and sold into the slavery before making a gory trip across the Atlantic Ocean, Diggs’ ancestors may have come to America as indentured servants.
A couple things identify my family in the Virginia area, so let me get to that.
Diggs also found out his grandfather’s surname was in the minutes of an 1813 church meeting that mentions the descendants of these former servants.
The Collins family was identified with three other families, the Gibsons, the sextons and the Boylans.
Do you know whether or not they’re Enslaved or free?
They’re free.
Because they move away form the area.
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Richard Diggs thinks his great grandfather is a good example of what America does not tell you about slavery.
RD: They would tell you we were all ignorant. We didn't read, we didn't write, we didn't know anything. We weren't smart. He's the total opposite of all those things. And yet he was the right in the middle of slavery.
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More after the break.
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By 2014, the Diggs family had exhausted their research.
That’s when Denise Diggs saw a news segment about the Smithsonian Institution’s newest museum asking for African-American artifacts. And the family decided to donate the bible.
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Richard Diggs flew with the Bible from California to Washington, D.C. where he gave it to a curator who examined the book.
It took about one year for the curator to confirm its authenticity and said the Bible was printed in 1869.
During that DC trip, Richard also performed a poem he wrote about his journey to uncover his ancestry.
RD POEM: I was this precocious little kid. You know, the one who thought life was just carefree. I never ever dreamed that through a twist of fate, I'd write the family tree.
The Bible was put on display in 2016, shortly after the museum opened its doors.
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Richard Diggs still hasn’t seen the Bible on display but his sister Denise has.
She says…It was worth the wait.
DD: For me not having children, I always wonder about, you know, who will remember me once I go. Now it feels like // our story will live on.
At the display, Denise noticed that most of the tourists around her were white.
She wondered if they could fully appreciate her ancestor’s accomplishment.
DD: I wonder if they. If they feel the significance of what a slave being able to do this means, or is this their first like introduction into the idea of what slaves' lives were like? Like, is this something they've never thought about until they've experienced this exhibit?
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Reporting this story, I was really happy an African American family was able to uncover so much about their family history.
It made me wonder if there was anything sitting in my parent’s attic that could help me cobble together a family tree.
RD POEM: The south still holds so many stories in all of those unmarked graves. And we've heard our old folks talk about stories from way back when, it's of these memories, the record and the history of our people does depend.
The Diggs family insist that though their ancestor was born into slavery, they would not remember him as a slave.
I know the reason now why my great grandpa chose me. He knew, I would not stop until I finished the Collins tree. And my great grandpa, Well, he'd be proud. Knowing I have done my best in the history of the Collins' name can now be put to rest.
Great Grandpa's Bible has been in the possession of only three men in our family tree. My great-grandfather Richard, my grandfather, Richard, and finally the last Richard me. So the circle of life of my great-grandfather has arced its way around to me and with God's grace, for as long as I live, I'll tell the history of the Collins family tree.
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Gustavo: And that's it for this episode of the times, daily news from the LA times.
Shannon Lin was the jefa of this episode.
Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, Ashley Brown, David Toledo. Our editorial assistant is Madalyn Amato. Our intern is Surya Hendry. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin, our editors, Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmin Aguilera, and Shani Hilton. Our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
Special thanks to Steve Padilla and Del Wilber.
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I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back tomorrow with all the news and desmadres. Gracias