Where Does a Family Name Come From?

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, another Juneteenth segment. What is the importance of a name? Sure, it's what people call you and what you respond to, but what else does a name hold? Is it a random set of letters and sounds that we attach meaning to, or is there something more within a name? Radiolab, editor, and producer Alex Neason set out to find the answers to these questions for herself in her piece, Family People.

In it, you'll hear her embark on a journey to Louisiana to discover the origins of her last name, Neason after learning that her name may not actually be Neason. What did she find? Well, let's hear from Alex Neason and professional genealogist, Nicka Sewell-Smith, who also joins us and is also in the piece. Alex and Nicka, thanks so much for joining us. Hi there.

Alex Neason: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Hello. Thanks for having me too.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to play a few clips here as we go. Let's start off with one, and Alex, would you set this up? You're asking your dad and your aunts in this 3-second clip about somebody named Wilson Howard. Do you want to set that up?

Alex Neason: Yes. This whole journey started with an obituary. My grandfather passed away and after the funeral, my parents brought an obituary back for me. In that obituary, it had all of the usual bio details that you see in an obit, including my grandfather's parents' names. I was very surprised to see that the man listed as his father was named Wilson Howard. I'd never heard of Wilson Howard before. More than that, I was very confused as to why his dad's last name was Howard and not Neason, and so I started asking questions.

Brian Lehrer: This clip begins with Alex asking a question of what looks like two aunts and her father. Here we go.

Alex Neason: So nobody knew much about Wilson Howard, and they had no idea where the name Neason came from. The weird thing was, well, my dad and his sisters all feel very much like Neasons, are proud of the name. When it comes to where it actually came from.

[start of video playback]

Alex Neason Aunt: Well, I haven't known this far in life.

Alex Neason Father: It's not going to necessarily change anything.

Alex Neason: They just didn't seem to care.

Alex Neason Father: I just never had a desire or an interest in it.

[end of video playback]

Brian Lehrer: Alex, let's talk first about caring because none of your family members shared this interest, it sounds like, in finding out the origins of your name. They had pride, a sense of pride in being Neasons. Where do you think the pride and the lack of curiosity comes from?

Alex Neason: Yes. For the sense of pride, I think it was really about what a name could become. For my dad and for all of his siblings, there were a lot of missing pieces. A lot of stuff that they didn't know particularly about their father's, my grandfather's side of the family. I think the choice that they made was just to take what they had, this name Neason, despite all of the question marks around it.

Where it came from, what it meant, who was Wilson Howard and why was his name Howard, and our name was Neason, and just to make it mean something for them in the present moving forward. Feeling a sense of pride in the name Neason is something that my dad really talked about and drilled into my sister and I when we were kids. I think it was important for him to know that we had agency in the world, that we could make this name mean something special and mean something important.

I don't think that there was necessarily a lack of curiosity about our family, but I think that over the years, my grandfather passed away in 2021 and I started asking questions about our name at that point. For my dad and his siblings, they'd been asking those questions or some of those questions for years and hadn't turned up any answers. I think at some point, they had to make a choice to say, "Well, there's a lot I don't know, but what I do know is that I can be proud of my name and I'm going to instill that in the kids, in the family, and we're just going to move forward with it."

I think that was the reason for them when I started asking questions, they were like, "Well, we've been down this road already and it didn't turn anything up, and so we've just moved on."

Brian Lehrer: Let me bring Nicka Sewell-Smith into the conversation. You specialize I see in the genealogy of people of color. Is there a Juneteenth context for this that you would put in that context?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Absolutely. I think that there are a number of factors that come into this. One of the most common misconceptions is that with African-American families, surnames are passed down undisturbed, and you start to really see that that's not always the case. There's the thought that the surname directly comes from the slaveholder, and sometimes that's the case.

Sometimes it's not the father slaveholder, but it would be the mother slaveholder since slavery itself was matrilineal, whatever the disposition the mother had, that's the disposition that the child had. Just because it's your father's surname, if you go back in time, it may not necessarily be connected to his father, might be connected to his mother.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your phone calls on these stories or questions, Black listeners, especially, in the context of this conversation. Have you looked into your own genealogy and learned the history of your name? What did you find and what it mean to you? We can also take your questions for genealogist, Nicka Sewell-Smith, even to help you get started on your family tree.

If that's what you want to do, call us or text us at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. We're going to play another clip from the Radiolab segment here right now. Alex hear is the moment where you learn about Levi Neason, your great-great-great great grandfather if I've got it right. You and Nicka are reading from archival auction papers.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 1851, October 10th, 1851.

Alex Neason: We find a transaction dated six years earlier than the auction when Viney was sold.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Abraham Neasom and William Franklin Neasom.

Alex Neason: Abraham the patriarch, is selling to his youngest son--

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Six certain Negroes of the names

Alex Neason: Six enslaved people tacked onto the end of this group we find this small, barely legible, so tiny, we almost missed it. Very, very precious name, Levi.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: A negro boy raised by hand and sick Lee about seven years, $250.

Brian Lehrer: Alex, what did you learn about Levi, his family, and I guess his owners from these documents?

Alex Neason: Yes. A lot of the stuff that we learned about Levi came via learning about the Neasoms, who were the white slave-owning family in Louisiana who owned both Levi and his mother Viney. We were able to learn that Viney had been owned by Abraham Neasom and that when he died, Viney had been sold to one of Abraham's sons, along with a whole host of other enslaved people.

We learned that Levi was not with her at that time, and so we had to go back into the archives and look to see where he was at. If he had been owned by the same family. We eventually did find him, and seven years earlier, he had been sold by the same Abraham Neasom to one of his sons, which is why in those auction papers that we found, Viney, he wasn't present with her.

He had already been sold away from her. Eventually, we learned that Viney had another child that we weren't aware of up until that point in those auction papers when Viney was sold, she was actually sold with a daughter named Sophia, who was 11 at the time. As we kept searching, we eventually learned that Levi had left the area. East Louisiana Parish is about two and a half hours from New Orleans.

We learned that Levi probably with this Abraham's son who he had been sold to, that they had left that area, and he eventually popped up in New Orleans a year after his enslaver died where he enlisted in the Union Army and went on to fight in the Civil War. Viney stayed in the same area for the rest of her life that the Neasoms had lived in the same area where she had been enslaved in and in fact, stayed living in a community of people who had also been enslaved by the Neasoms.

We found all kinds of things, a whole pension file with a lot of information about Levi's time in the military and about what happened to him after the war. We know that he lived in and around New Orleans, that he rented a cabin. That he worked for an Italian family when he could. We learned that he was disabled and spent significant time petitioning the US government for what we would call today a disability pension. There were all kinds of problems in the military's record-keeping around his name. His name was spelled and misspelled a bunch of different ways.

We found Neasom, the same as the enslaver. We found it with an L with one E, with two E's, all the way up to Neason the way that I spell it today. We learned that he eventually married a woman named Celia Hall. He had six children. We learned all kinds of incredible details all the way up until his death in 1921, including the name of his mortician, who was one of the first Black people in New Orleans to own a mortuary, Émile Loubet. We were just finding these very granular details about his life that I never imagined were knowable at the beginning of this journey, at the beginning of this very long journey.

Brian Lehrer: How do you think knowing those details that you just laid out changed you?

Alex Neason: I think my interest in wanting to do a story like this was rooted in my belief that our future is informed by our past. I think I had a hard time as myself in the present moving into my future and charting my future while knowing that I had this very incomplete image of my past and not just my recent past around the questions about who was my grandfather's actual father, who was Wilson Howard, was there some other man that we got the name Neason from but even beyond that, even regardless of what the answer to that question was, I always had this understanding that I have a European last name and that I'm not a European person. Where does that come from?

I know that my family that we come from enslaved people in the US but that was it. It was like otherwise this big gaping hole and it felt really important for me to understand the details of that hole, to shine some light in there so that I can continue to move forward in my life with this charge that was passed to me by my dad to take care of my name and to care for it and to make sure that it means something. I think filling in all of these details helps me better do that.

Brian Lehrer: I wonder if any Black listeners right at this moment have ever undertaken a similar journey. If you have what you might consider a Western name and wondered where it came from, if your family has been in this country this long, has it come from a slaveholder once upon a time or anybody else who has traced your lineage back to the times of enslavement, what did you learn about yourself through learning about your name or exploring your genealogy? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or anybody who's listened to Alex and Nicka's Radiolab segment, 212-433-9692 with a question for them. Nicka, in the segment, you were particularly excited to learn that Levi Neason served in the Civil War, right?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Yes. That's always a highlight for me.

Brian Lehrer: How come?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Number one, I think the role that Black men and even Black women have had in our US military, I think the populace at large just doesn't understand. Especially when you start talking about the Civil War, you're talking of upwards of 180,000 Black men and then you tack on the nurses, maids, matrons, Black women who were an integral part of the war effort for the union. People often argue, "Would the union have won without them?" I would say, in my opinion, probably not but within their service, you get another place to look for record.

In particular, the pension file, like Alex mentioned, is such a unique document in that it's not like the census where it's a set day beginning of a decade. You find out information about those people, it's all the years and the days between that, that we don't get context. It's one of the few documents where you get to actually read depositions and affidavits from those folks who were living at the time in their own words, talking to these pension examiners who were coming down to validate the claims of the veterans. Things like, were they married to a particular woman?

Had they been remarried, how old were their children? Who were their comrades in service with them? We rarely get those first-person accounts from Black folks at that time period. Anytime you can find a Civil War veteran and they have a pension, you absolutely have to seek it out because again, I think the only other project I've ever seen that are similar to it are the works progress administration, the slave narratives, which a lot of folks are familiar with those where you had writers, journalists going throughout the country to interview formerly enslaved people.

It's very similar to that. It's similar to the Dawes applications for the five tribes where you have interrogatories, there's the person representing the Dawes Commission is asking questions of the people being interviewed. They're just few and far between times where people actually cared to document their stories and their lives from their perspective with their words and these pension files are what do it. It's not just the veterans. If the veteran passed away, it's their wives who could apply.

It's like in our scenario with Levi, Viney applied for his pension not knowing if her son was alive or was dead when she applied for it. She had one as a mother thinking he had no family, and that he had not survived. He had one. Children could apply for their parents' pensions. Fathers could apply for their sons. Again, it's just these very unique first-person accounts and documents that give us just an incredible bird's eye view into the lives of our ancestors.

Brian Lehrer: Hassani in Park Slope. You're on WNYC. Hi, Hassani.

Hassani: Thank you, Brian. I'm also a sustaining member.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Hassani: My genealogy I was able to trace to my great-great-grandfather who was a formerly enslaved person. He fought in the Union Army and he was given 140-something acres to Saddle Riverside. He went from covered wagon from Atlanta, Georgia, with seven of his family members to Saddle Riverside. My grandmother's father with a first child born with a birth certificate. In the census records of 1870 in Atlanta, I have him documented there as not being able to read or write.

I have his voter registration card, and it says he had a scar above his left eye and he was of darker skin. I have him voting in 1870, and those records just mean so much to me. He also fought for his pension as well. I have all the details as a woman who's [unintelligible 00:17:56], all the details of his actions in the Civil War. It's documented because he kept trying to fight for his pension. That history just means so much to me and it gives me such a great sense of pride.

From that as well, I found out that his son, the one I said that was born the [unintelligible 00:18:15] was the chauffeur to the LA Mayor and one of the first Black firefighters. This history for African Americans just means so much to us. It ties us to our path. It gives us a great sense of pride. I cherish in knowing that I have so much lineage and I call myself a patriot because my family's been fighting since the Civil War. My father was also in the military, have great uncles who were in the military.

It just gives me a great sense of pride of being a patriot of this country and being proud to be an absolute American and being African American heritage and being someone who has gone on to Harvard, who went to HBCU. I have children, they're doing very well, and I am my ancestors' absolutely wildest dreams.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Nicka, anything that you as a genealogist want to ask Hassani? I made you speechless.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Absolutely. I think one of the things that you could do to go even further is look at those witnesses in the pension file. I think a lot of folks don't think about witnesses in that vantage point, we have witnesses to marriages, we have witnesses or informants on death certificates. I would really dig into the other folks who were interviewed because it's possible, especially if they were comrades of your ancestor, that he actually served as a witness for their pensions.

Maybe may have mentioned details in their pension files that may get you further back beyond him if you haven't already done that. I want you to keep going because I don't want you to stop with the great, great grandparent. I want you to go further.

Hassani: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Hassani, thank you.

Hassani: Also to tell you, I'm thinking about the reparations piece of that too, because we don't own any of that land. My great-grandfather, he gave that land for Second Baptist Church in Riverside, and that's basically all that's really left. Anyway, I just thank you so very much for all that you're doing to preserve and I would love to be in contact. Thank you, Brian, for this. Thank you for this Juneteenth recognition too.

Brian Lehrer: Hassani, thank you so much. Darryl in Mount Vernon, you're on WNYC. Hi, Darryl.

Darryl: Hi. Good morning, Brian. I have a question just in regards to a last name. My family's last name is Vanable. I have a little challenge finding any history in regards to that name.

Brian Lehrer: You want to spell it?

Darryl: V-A-N-A-B-L-E.

Brian Lehrer: Nicka, I guess I'll give this one to you too. You ever hear that name before?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Actually, no, but I'm wondering if it was supposed to be Zenable. It would be similar to what we dealt with, with Alex, where the more currently living people were looking for Neason with an N on the end and the source of the surname was Neasom with an M on the end. A lot of times you do see this with Black families, even people living in the same geographical area where you'll have a Black family and a white family where the white family may have been the slave-holding family and the Black family may have been enslaved by the slave-holding family.

They will have derivative surnames. It'll be the white slave-holding family has a brown with no E but the formerly enslaved people have a brown with an E. Your surname sounds so similar to Zenable. I'm wondering if that might actually be what it is, or the other thing we have to also recognize is that a lot of our ancestors, again, when they were walking into life as a person and not a commodity or a product anymore, they chose what they wanted to be referred to.

Sometimes people would make up surnames. One of my family's surnames is Atlas, A-T-L-A-S. There are no slaveholders with that surname in the United States. It does not exist.

For every ancestor that I have that has that, whenever I meet another Atlas, I know those people are related to me because it's virtually impossible because there's not a single person. I would say geographically speaking with your family, look to see if there are any Zenable surnames or any Vin, Val, anything that's very similar to that. Get your bearings on that environment and who those families are because it's not a super common name. Again, it may be that it might be derivative of that.

Darryl: Thank you. I get that a lot.

Brian Lehrer: Darryl, thank you.

Darryl: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: I hope that's helpful. By the way, here's a reaction on Twitter to Hassani's call just before. A listener writes, "What a wonderful call from Hassani. I love the expression. I am my ancestors' wildest dreams. Beautiful. Thank you," tweets that listener. Here's a text. Alex, you have a fan here. "Thanks for Alex's segment. I'm deep into uncovering my family tree. As a Black woman, I was surprised to uncover white people in my tree just two generations before me.

I found and met the people in my tree who owned my family. That family rehabbed the family cemetery, including the enslaved graves. The state of Virginia bought the cemetery and made it a landmark. By the way, my name is Bryson. I learned the Brysons were prolific slave owners and are noted in history books. It's a fascinating journey." Alex, since she addressed that to you, can you relate?

Alex Neason: One, it's interesting because I got this question or a question similar to that a lot as I was working on this. The question of how interested I was in the Neasom family, the white slave-owning family. I think while I was working on this, I thought of the Neasoms as a source of information more than anything else. I actually wasn't interested in the modern descendants, but Nicka and I, and also Annie McEwen who produced the piece. We took a trip down to Louisiana where we visited a lot of these archives and cemeteries and libraries and the rest in person.

Just before that trip, Nicka and I were on a Zoom call and I just plugged the name Neasom into Google Maps to see what was around. We found roads with the name Neasom, I found a church, I found a school. I did a little bit of digging and found that some of these places were named for people whose surname was Neasom. It was not immediately clear if they are ancestors of Abraham, but all still living in the same area where Abraham and his family had settled.

I think for me, there were so many holes in my own family's history and those were the holes I wanted to fill in. Those are the dark places that I was trying to shine a flashlight into, and so Neasom family was a means to an end. So much of Black history because of this country's history of enslavement, when you want to find these Black stories, you often have to look to white families, because my ancestors were not considered people.

I think that was the extent of my interest in the Neasoms. A genealogy endeavor is never really complete, is the first lesson I learned from Nicka. 16 months later, having learned all of the things that I've learned, I think, for me, it still feels there's such a wealth of information and context about Black people who became Neasons that I'm interested in.

I think that is my primary focus much more so than the history of the Neasom family, which actually is quite well documented in official records, and also other descendants of Abraham Neasom have done their own family histories.

I found a whole book written by a Neasom descendant from Texas that had a lot of details about Abraham and a whole lot of different branches of the Neasom family. It's a 200-page document that we found online. I think information about that family seems pretty covered. My focus is much more on my family, on Black people.

Brian Lehrer: Let's sneak one more caller story in here. We're running overtime but I think it's worth it. John in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Can you do it in a minute?

John: I can certainly try. [laughs]. I can trace my family's history back to a William who was a confederate slave who was freed by a Captain Bliss. They brought him back to Peterborough, New York, where the wealthy abolitionist Garrett Smith lived. This William took Garrett's last name to be the family last name, and that's where my family name comes from. I go back to that point, but then I've been unable to dig further because I don't have records about that William Smith.

Brian Lehrer: There was a union soldier who helped free an enslaved ancestor, and they took that soldier's name. Am I hearing you right?

John: No. That part confuses me. I would assume that he would've taken that soldier's name, but he went back to Peterborough where this Garrett Smith, this abolitionist lived, and he had done so much for formerly enslaved folks in the area that he took Smith's last name as the family name.

Brian Lehrer: Got you. John, thank you very much. Alex, where do you wind up in our last 30 seconds or a minute here, in your relationship with your name Neason? I could imagine after your story, you would want to just throw it out and make up a name for yourself and your kids if you have kids, but not. I mean, you seem to have pride in it.

Alex Neason: Yes, it's actually the opposite. This is something that I didn't always feel this way. I felt a lot of inner conflict the more we learned about the Neasom family, particularly when we learned about, not just my ancestors, but the many other people that this family had owned. I think where I've landed at is seeing what I was doing, my desire to use my name to learn more about myself and about my family is the same thing that Viney Levi did when after the war in those incredible disruptive moments post-emancipation where they were looking for each other, where a lot of Black people, the first thing that they did was look for their people.

I think I feel this sense of comradery or connection to them that they did this and they used this name to help them find each other. That's what I did too. If anything, I think, learning about the ways that as soon as they were able to, that they exercised and acted on their own agency. The role that our name played in that is the same thing that my grandfather did, that my dad did, and that now I'm doing.

Brian Lehrer: Well, listeners, you should check out the whole Radiolab segment with Radiolab producer and editor, Alex Neason and genealogist Nicka Sewell-Smith. We end it here for this show's conversation with them. Thank you so much. This was really wonderful. Happy Juneteenth Independence Day.

Alex Neason: Happy Juneteenth. Thanks so much.

 

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