A fifth cousin, four times removed, is not a close relative by any stretch of the imagination. But filmmaker Ken Burns was more than happy to have that connection presented to him on the Oct. 7 episode of “Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.” on MPBN.
“This is the bee’s knees,” Burns said. “This is the guy I have in my soul.”
Burns, whose film productions have covered everything from the Civil War to baseball to the Roosevelts, was, of course, talking about President Abraham Lincoln.
Interestingly, Burns had two ancestors named Abraham who fought in the Civil War, but not for the Union Army.
Abraham W. Burns, who lived in Virginia, volunteered for the Confederacy and became a prisoner of war held at Camp Chase in Ohio. He did end up taking the Oath of Allegiance to the Union, but it seems clear he did so as a requirement of being released from the prison.
As for Abraham Smith, Burns’s second great-grandfather who lived in West Virginia, he actually owned six slaves according to the 1860 Census, news that was disappointing to Burns.
“This still hurts,” he told Gates on learning that Smith was a slave owner. “There’s a kind of sadness. It’s so repugnant — so un-American.”
CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper knew that his dad, the later writer Wyatt Cooper, came from a poor family in Mississippi, was told that Civil War ancestors R.F. Campbell and Burwell Cooper did not own slaves, nor did they have the means to do so.
But fourth great-grandfather Burwell Boykin of Alabama did own 12 slaves, Anderson Cooper learned, all of whom were listed in the Census without names. The Mortality Schedule included with that Census, which enumerated those who had died within the past year, named Burwell Boykin as recently deceased, having been “killed by Negro.”
Actor and playwright Anna Devere Smith was most pleased to learn about ancestor Basil Biggs of Maryland, a Free Person of Color who moved with wife Mary Jackson to Pennsylvania in 1858. The family was forced off its farm during the Civil War when the Confederates took it over for a field hospital.
Biggs, a veterinary surgeon, after the Battle of Gettysburg got the contract to hire people and work with them to disinter Union soldiers who had been buried in shallow graves, then remove them and bury them at what would become the Gettysburg National Cemetery.
Moreover, Smith was told, during the Civil War, Biggs used his ability to move freely during the Civil War to serve “as an active agent in the Underground Railroad.”
For information on researching family history in Maine, see Genealogy Resources under Family Ties at bangordailynews.com/browse/family-ties. Send genealogy queries to Family Ties, Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor 04402, or email familyti@bangordailynews.com.