
A Hudson Valley Reckoning
Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family
- 304 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
A Hudson Valley Reckoning
Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family
About this book
A Hudson Valley Reckoning tells the long-ignored story of slavery's history in upstate New York through Debra Bruno's absorbing chronicle that uncovers her Dutch ancestors' slave-holding past and leads to a deep connection with the descendants of the enslaved people her family owned.
Bruno, who grew up in New York's Hudson Valley knowing little about her Dutch heritage, was shaken when a historian told her that her Dutch ancestors were almost certainly slaveholders. Driven by this knowledge, Bruno began to unearth her family's past. In the last will and testament of her ancestor, she found the first evidence: human beings bequeathed to his family along with animals and furniture. The more she expanded her family tree, the more enslavers she found. She reached out to Black Americans tracing their own ancestry, and by serendipitous luck became friends with Eleanor C. Mire, a descendent of a woman enslaved by Bruno's Dutch ancestors.
A Hudson Valley Reckoning recounts Bruno's journey into the nearly forgotten history of Northern slavery and of the thousands of enslaved people brought in chains to Manhattan and the Hudson Valley. With the help of Mire, who provides a moving epilogue, Debra Bruno tells the story of white and Black lives impacted by the stain of slavery and its long legacy of racism, as she investigates the erasure of the uncomfortable truths about our family and national histories.
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Information
Table of contents
- Historical Figures
- A Note about Dutch Names
- Introduction: The Reluctant Archeologist
- 1. Fifty Beaver Skins
- 2. The Lost History
- 3. âThey Are Calling to Usâ
- 4. âA Vile Slanderâ
- 5. âWe May Be Van Bergens after Allâ
- 6. Resistance and Running
- 7. Casper and Nancy in the Twilight
- 8. The Last Enslavers
- 9. âRoots of Poison and Bitternessâ
- 10. Confederates in the Family
- 11. Vanderzee by Vanderzee, Filling in the Puzzle
- 12. What Remains
- 13. Repair
- Afterword: Full Circle
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index