3 days ago
A Tufts alum completed a fellowship. Lesson learned: he's related to his alma mater's founder.
In a way, the genealogical discovery has reinforced his career goals. He's pursuing a master's in history at the University of Virginia in the fall, with a focus on African American life during the
Unlike many African Americans, Mosley grew up knowing some things about his family roots. He has many fond memories visiting the Lang Syne Plantation in South Carolina, where descendants of the people who labored on and around the land gather
every other year to recognize their ancestors' legacies. Here, the seeds for his lifelong interest in genealogy were planted.
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'I was always interested in who my ancestors were, what their experiences were,' Mosley said.
One branch of his family tree is somewhat documented. The Lang Syne Plantation is a historic landmark. Some characters in
Scarlet Sister Mary
, a 1929 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the Gullah people, are loosely based on a handful of his ancestors.
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Mosley gained some research skills to supplement his family tree through the
Within the program, students receive opportunities to learn about the communities that contributed to Tufts' legacy.
'That kind of place-based learning is really phenomenal, and creates all sorts of connections and opportunities that might otherwise be unavailable,' Field said.
As a descendant of enslaved people in America, Mosley had a hunch that white people made up some branches of his family tree. But the documents available to him couldn't explain how.
'If you're doing African American genealogy in America, it's very difficult to get past that wall of slavery,' said John Hannigan, archivist and project manager for the SCL initiative.
DNA filled in the gaps, Hannigan said, and 'opened up the entire realm ... back to the 17th century.'
Mosley took an
Jabez Weeks, a white overseer on the Lang Syne Plantation where Mosley's enslaved ancestors labored.
Jabez Weeks and Mary Green, an enslaved woman, had a son, Mosley's fourth great-grandfather James.
Once Mosley corroborated this, he worked backwards. He followed the paper trail of census records, estate records, and written genealogies his white ancestors left behind. He traced Jabez's lineage into North Carolina, into Falmouth, and finally landed with the Tufts family.
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Mosley's family tree, like so many others, is long and hard to follow.
But it goes something
like this: Mary Lynde is Mosley's 12th great-grandmother.
Sometime in the 17th century, her brother, Thomas Lynde, married Elizabeth Tufts, whose father is Peter Tufts Sr. Some 200 years later, Charles Tufts, one of Peter's descendants, would donate 100 acres straddling Medford and Somerville to a group of members from the Universalist Church to build what would later become Tufts University.
Photo of Mary Weeks Bryant taken from a family album. A character from the 1929 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Scarlet Sister Mary was loosely based on Bryant. (Jaiden Mosley)
Jaiden Mosley
Thus, 'the Tufts family are like my cousins,' Mosley said.
When he made the connection, Mosley looked at his computer in shock.
'I'm caught up in my Blackness and my 'southerness,'' Mosley said. 'I didn't think I had any type of relation to New England, Boston, or Tufts.'
Mosley's genealogical discovery adds more nuance to Tufts' legacy, said Heather Curtis, the
director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts.
'There's this sense that any school founded in the 1850s in the North would have nothing to do with slavery except for opposing it,' Curtis, a professor who is also a principal investigator for SCL, said. But 'just because we are in the North doesn't mean that the school and the Tufts family were not intricately intertwined with the slave trade and the slave economy.'
Mosley's family story, Curtis said, is an 'incredible story' that captures some of these complexities.
As Mosley pieced together his Tufts roots, he said he's had to grapple with shameful parts of his ancestors' pasts. One owned roughly 40 enslaved people. When the Civil War broke out, Jabez Weeks enlisted in the Confederate Army.
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A pedestrian walked on the Tufts University Campus in Medford.
Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff
On top of this, Mosley had to face a harsh reality: his connection to the Tufts family is most likely a product of sexual violence, a product of the one-sided power dynamic between white overseers and enslaved women in the American South.
'It's ugly history, but nonetheless, they are my ancestors,' Mosley said.
When Mosley put the pieces of his family tree together, he did think about
As Mosley learns more of his Tufts relatives, he hopes the contributions of his Black ancestors aren't overshadowed.
His ancestors helped build a school for formerly enslaved children near where their plantation once stood. James Weeks, his fourth-great grandfather, helped organize African American voters during Reconstruction, and was supposedly lynched for his bravery. And at least two enslaved men ran away from their plantations and joined the Union Army.
These stories are oral histories, family lore that Mosley has yet to support with evidence, but nonetheless stories that shape his sense of self.
When exploring your family history, Mosley said, 'Just be open to the ugly, the interesting, the bad, the diverse experiences.'
Tufts wasn't Mosley's first choice. But he believes in fate.
'I think I was meant to go here,' he said.
Tiana Woodard can be reached at
