NOT SURE OF A TITLE

I'm not sure how to go about this. I've been working on the family tree for over ten years. There have been time when I didn't go after new material but I was usually looking somebody up on the program on my computer. It never really sank in how lucky my family is. We know where we came from. The last immigrant to come off the boat arrived in 1850. Her family we don't know about. We know the ame of the ship. The family was Irish or Scots Irish, probably boarded at Belfast or Liverpool, landed in New York. I don't really know what my gggfather's first name was. He was listed on the manifest as Mick Clinton. And that is all we know. He didn't appear on the 1860 census or any census after that. 

But the Heatons came over as a family. The Coffins came over as a family. The Noyses. If immigrants didn't come from the same village they sailed as a religious group. They knew where they came from and passed it on. Even the immigrants in the great waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century knew where they came from. If they didn't come as families, and they often did they could name a home village or town. Even Scandinavian or German families settled as groups in the upper midwest. In some farming communities they're still speaking German. Kept their foods, learned English eventually, kept their religion if they wished. 

Now what if you are an African American. Most of your ancestors didn't make the journey because they wanted to. (I'm leaving out the white indentured servants. Some came semi voluntarily. More than a few were sentenced to the colonies to serve instead of being jailed. Most were eventually freed and had access to land and some cash or tools,) 

Perhaps you were kidnapped while working in your fields or hunting. Your tribal leader went to war with somebody else, your side lost; you and everyone you knew were enslaved, taken to the coast. To collection centers like Goree Island. Little better than concentration camps. If families were taken together they were separated at the camp. Even if families were kept together there would be almost no chance that they would be sold together. My God. The slave museum on Goree Island even had a holding pen for CHILDREN. Children. I wonder how many survived the voyage west. I wonder how many women heard the raiders coming and hid their children. Praying somehow that they would survive.

After a hellish voyage that lasted four to six weeks if you were "lucky" maybe three months if you weren't. If you didn't die of disease. If the ship became short of food or water and you were seen as too weak to finish the trip and thrown overboard, alive. You made it to the breaking pens or the slave market. Where you weere stripped of your name, your religion, your identity. Hell I know the name of the ship Robert Heaton made the trip. It was the Lamb. Made port in Pennsylvania in the fall of 1682. I seriously doubt if any slave could name the hell ship that carried him or her away from western Africa. 

I think I'm going to stop here for now.