Viola Baskerville’s family research led her to the Marriage Register of Freedmen in Hanover County. Chris Smith photo
Viola Baskerville is known for her steady advance through public service: She served on Richmond City Council in the late 1990s and then two terms in the Virginia House of Delegates before being named state Secretary of the Administration under Gov. Tim Kaine in 2006.
But long outlasting her high-profile career, Baskerville has moonlighted for more than 30 years as a sort of unpaid detective. Her investigation has taken her to damp rural cemeteries and into archive rooms where she's peered for hours at yellowing records trying to solve mysteries that are centuries old. The lingering questions she sought to answer are about herself, her origins and her family's path from slavery to where she stands today.Exposing the branches of the family tree is a commitment. Great patience is required for determining one fact. The triumph of gaining one more step, matching a name, confirming a date, makes the pursuit worth the effort. In Baskerville's case, born and raised in Richmond, her family seems to have stayed fairly close by — her maternal line in Hanover County, paternal in Buckingham.
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She began by listening to the stories her mother, Josephine Braxton Osborne, told about the "old folk."
"It's the simplest thing," she says, "listening to the oldest living relative and taking copious notes. These are your clues in what to search." Even if what's said may be regarded as family tradition without documentation, there's no telling, once you start digging, what you may find, she explains.
Baskerville went to the Church of the Latter Day Saints on Monument Avenue where, combing through census records, she found her great-grandfather, Major Braxton, who was born in 1849, counted among a family in Cold Harbor.
"It's a little like time travel," she says. "You can't speak with them, but they communicate with their names and dates."
Baskerville's maternal grandmother was Ellen Ann Johnson Braxton. Her great-grandmother's name was Jane, but she was blind and adopted, an apparent orphan of the Civil War. She remains one of the lineage's enigmas without sufficient documentation to determine her origins.
Working from her grandfather, Charles Braxton, to her great-grandfather, Major, and then great-great-grandfather, Corbin (born in 1803), Baskerville made an interesting discovery. A Mormon friend suggested that rather than rely on census records, she should go to the Hanover Circuit Court records.
An 1866 act of the Virginia General Assembly required that the marriages of freedmen be registered in public records.
In Hanover's freedmen's register, Baskerville was able to delve further into her family's history, and she credits the county's circuit court clerk with showing her the way.
"Thanks to Frank Hargrove Jr., Hanover has an active preservation of their records," Baskerville says. Among the columns of the Marriage Register of Freedmen, Baskerville found her ancestors Corbin Braxton and Amy Cob. They listed their ages at marriage as Corbin, 23, and Amy, 19, meaning, says Baskerville, that they'd managed to keep their marriage together through slavery, more than 40 years. Their trip to the courthouse was an affirmation of survival. In the 1870 census, their children are listed.
"I understood then my family's commitment to family," Baskerville says. There in print the ancestors spoke in the silence of a clerk's harried hand: Corbin and Amy had gone through the tragedy of slavery and come out the other side, together.
The notations in Hanover also pushed Baskerville's search back to Robbin Braxton, a great-great-great-grandfather born in 1780, that her mother had not known of.
Much African-American ancestry is tied to white documentation of property and wills. In King William County records, Baskerville learned that Carter Braxton had given land to a relative and deeded some slaves. He paid George Braxton in slaves. One was named Robbin — is that Baskerville's ancestor?
"I don't know," she says. "Carter Braxton is one of the eight Virginia signers of the Declaration of Independence. His name is on a plaque in the Virginia Senate chambers. He was a slaver — he ran slave ships. My suspicion is that Robbin Braxton was a slave, or one that George Braxton owned."
Baskerville's family tree is documented back 220 years to King William and Hanover counties; records show slaves, then freedmen, country farmers and, on her father's side, Alfred C. Garnett (1863-1939), a white, small-town businessman.
Grey- or blue-eyed descendants at family reunions raised Baskerville's curiosity. Her grandfather revealed late in life that he believed his father to have been Garnett. A DNA swab test of her brother, Clifton Cleveland Osborne Jr. — analyzed through Ancestry.com — returned a map of his genetic origins showing Europe and Russia. "I don't see Africa anywhere on there," she wryly says, looking at a printout of the report.
Along with her brother, that same genetic trail arrives at Baskerville, a Fulbright fellow, educated at the College of William and Mary and the University of Iowa College of Law.
She observes that the more pieces of her tree that fit together comes the realization that there is less a question of race than, ethnicity. "Studying the family genealogy," she says, "we realize we're just one big family of human beings."
