This article is also a weekly newsletter. Sign up for Race/Related here.
Debra Bruno used to love sharing stories about her family’s deep roots in upstate New York. She often talked about her Italian ancestors who migrated to the Hudson Valley around the early 1900s and her Dutch forebears who established homesteads near Albany as far back as the 1650s.
But a conversation with a friend, who is a historian, left her shaken, raising unsettling questions about her lineage.
“If you have Dutch ancestors in the Hudson Valley,” the friend told her, “they were probably slave owners.”
Enslavers in New York? In her family? It felt like “a splash of cold water on my face,” recalled Bruno, a writer who lives in Washington, D.C.
In the spring of 2018, she started digging, scrolling through archival records on Ancestry, a genealogical website. It took only a few weeks to find the will of Isaac Collier, a maternal ancestor.
“I give and bequeath to my son Joel one other feather bed,” Collier declared in 1796, and “one Negro boy named Will.”
“It changed the way I saw my family,” said Bruno, who has spent the last seven years digging deeper into her family’s history and writing about it. “Who were these people?”
And who, she wondered, were the descendants of the people they had enslaved?
Her story illuminates the often overlooked history of slavery in the North, which has drawn growing attention from scholars and state and local officials in recent years. But it is also the story of an unexpected friendship that developed after Bruno met a descendant linked to one of the families her ancestors had enslaved.
Bruno chronicled her journey in a book, “A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family,” published in October 2024. Since then, she has shared her family’s story in dozens of talks in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., emphasizing the importance of understanding Northern slavery, even as the Trump administration directs American institutions to turn away from a focus on the stains on the country’s conscience.
“It was an experience that many more people had than we would like to admit,” Leslie M. Harris, a historian at Northwestern University, said of slaveholding in Northern families.
In 1641, Massachusetts became the first British colony to recognize slavery as a legal institution. By 1730, 42 percent of households in New York City held Black people in captivity, a higher percentage than in any other city in the country except Charleston, S.C.
New York did not fully abolish slavery until 1827. New Jersey still had more than 200 people living in bondage in 1850 and more than a dozen in 1860.
Officials have begun to confront this history. In 2023, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York established a commission to study slavery and its legacies, considering reparations for the descendants of the enslaved. The decision followed similar moves in Illinois, California and Boston. Universities like Georgetown, Harvard, Yale and Amherst College have also examined their ties to slavery.
Harris, the author of “In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863,” described such efforts as a way of addressing what she and other scholars have described as the “focus on forgetting” slavery in the region. After the Civil War, she said, many Northerners were “deeply burying their own complicity of slavery, trying to create a narrative of innocence.”
Growing numbers of Americans are discovering slaveholders in their family trees through genealogy websites like Ancestry and FamilySearch. But “not everyone wants to know the truth,” Harris said.
Bruno, 68, said that while her husband and children were intrigued by her discoveries, some white friends and acquaintances felt uncomfortable when she started discussing what she found. “It was a really good way to shut down a conversation,” she said.
Still, she kept researching and, about a year after finding her ancestor’s will, she posted a message in a genealogy group on Facebook. . She mentioned her Dutch ancestors, who had enslaved scores of people, and asked to speak to anyone descended from enslaved people in upstate New York.
Less than 24 hours later, she got a message from Eleanor C. Mire, a retired construction worker in the Boston suburbs. Mire, who is Black, had been researching her ancestors who had lived in the Hudson Valley.
She had come across white researchers on Ancestry in the past who appeared to have a connection to her family and tried to communicate with them.
“But whenever I would slide in that we’re talking about a Black family, they would be gone, I mean gone,” said Mire, 73, describing how communication would abruptly cease once it appeared that slavery or blood might be the link between the white and Black families.
She reached out to Bruno anyway. “I took a deep breath and hoped she wouldn’t disappear,” Mire said.
The two women first spoke on the phone in June of 2019. It turned out that their ancestors had lived in the same towns in upstate New York, Coxsackie and New Baltimore, and shared at least one surname: Vanderzee.
They knew then that their families might be connected by blood or slaveholding or both.
“Your head explodes, oh my God,” said Mire, describing that moment.
They joined forces to try to find records that might document the connection.
They focused on one of Bruno’s ancestors, Conraedt Houghtaling, who held a couple, Cesar and Rebecca Egberts, captive in his home. Mary Vanderzee, Mire’s great-great-great-grandmother, lived in the home of the Houghtalings as a servant for a time. Her death certificate described the Egberts as her parents.
But no documentation of Vanderzee’s birth has been found. Instead, Bruno and Mire found unanswered questions, inconsistencies and uncertainties in the documents they uncovered.
The search brought the two women closer together. They discovered and visited Vanderzee’s grave and identified a house where she once lived and walked through its rooms.
Mire, who wrote the afterword to Bruno’s book, said that people are sometimes surprised by their friendship. She attributes it to Bruno’s willingness to acknowledge the history of slaveholding in her family.
“We talked, and with that talk came trust, and with that trust, came friendship,” Mire wrote. “Our families are coming together, full circle, in us.”
Bruno said that her book has been warmly received by the predominantly white audiences who attend her talks. But she has also encountered some skepticism.
“Is she changing her will? Cashing out her kids’ checking account?” asked one woman on Facebook soon after the book was published. “Making any effort at all to reconnect with the descendants of those who created her inherited wealth, so she can at least monetarily recompense their financial loss?”
Bruno knew that the woman hadn’t read her book because of the comment asking if she had even tried to find the descendants of those enslaved by her family. At the same time, she said, she understands that some people might view her work as performative.
Nothing could be further from the truth, she said. She is still asking herself what more she can do and encouraging her readers to do the same.
“We all, as Americans, have a responsibility to know our entire history,” she said. “We can’t really understand this country without having a full realization of what went before.”
Invite your friends.
Invite someone to subscribe to the Race/Related newsletter. Or email your thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].
Rachel L. Swarns is a journalist and author who covers race and race relations as a contributing writer for The Times.
The post She Confronted a History of Enslavers in Her Family. Here’s What Happened. appeared first on New York Times.
