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Below: Excerpt from an article published
in Ancestry Magazine, Nov. 2002. Written
by Sunny Nash.
FROM
he Peterson legacy revealed itself to me when the State of Texas commissioned
me to be part of an excavation and investigative team to study Ned and Elizabeth
Peterson's farm site, among the first land to be purchased by African Americans in
Southern Brazos County near the Grimes County border of the Brazos Valley in Central
Texas, about 100 miles Northwest of Houston.
Texas A&M University in College Station purchased a portion of the Peterson land in 1940,
held the land for about 50 years and, in the early 1990s, planned construction. Because of
historic classification, the Peterson property required a thorough examination and
published report before construction could begin. Data mishandled in the past
complicated record gathering --incomplete birth and death records, careless spelling,
multiple first names and disregard for last names during slavery. For example, various
Texas records named Ned Peterson, Edward with no last name, and called him, Ned No. 3,
to distinguish him from other African Americans with the same first name. In spite of past
omissions, archaeologists exhumed, labeled and stored bits of China dishes, pottery,
colored glass and jewelry, and uncovered stone steps, window glass and part of a kitchen
while artists rendered representations of farm buildings. Historians searched county and
state records for marriage, childbirth, landownership, voting, purchase, livestock and crop
production, credit and death records.
Iti
H 0
istory
Case Study
by Sunny Nash
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Based on these findings, I compiled a list of Ned and Elizabeth Peterson's descendants and
discovered that their great -great grandson, the late Alandrus "Lanny" Peterson, III, had been
one of my best friends in high school. After interviewing several other Petersons, I came
upon Lanny's parents, Atoy and Alandrus II, on my list. I did not need directions to a house
where I'd spent so much time. When I walked in, memories flooded back and I sat down on
the floor by the coffee table that had not moved since I was there more than thirty years ago.
Without oral tradition, notes in bibles, funeral programs
and pieces of china to augment records, the Petersons'
ancestry would have been lost.
The Petersons being landowners, entrepreneurs, consumers, taxpayers and legally married
couples, leaving a path, lined with public documents to substantiate their rich oral history,
allowed the team to gather, catalog, interview descendants and construct their family tree
and provide the story of a real family, whose roots are deep in American soil, a family that
fits into a
much
larger context of American
history, than Lanny and I
could have ever
imagined
when
we were growing up in the
1950s and `60s in Bryan,
Texas.