Former Lithonia mayor traces ancestry to Sierra Leone

Marcia Glenn Hunter long wondered where her family got its drive. Yes, her mother, Maggie Woods, had raised eight children by herself, worked full-time and still found time to volunteer in government and schools in Lithonia.

She became the first black woman elected to the city’s council in 1972.

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Courtesy of Marcia Glenn Hunter

The Woods siblings, with a playmate, grew up in a three-room shack and all went on to solid middle-class lives, including becoming public officials in their hometown of Lithonia.

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Johnny Crawford/jcrawford@ajc.com

Marcia Glenn Hunter points to a photo in an album held by Barbara Lester. Their siblings (from right) Kenneth Woods, Roger Woods Jr., Laverne Baker and sister-in-law Mary Woods talk family roots that Hunter uncovered through diligent digging.

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• Photos: Tracing the family history

FINDING YOUR ROOTS

• Interested in examining slave-ship manifests for your own history? The "Were Your Ancestors Slaves" presentation and workshop is 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the National Archives Southeast Region's office, 5780 Jonesboro Road, Morrow. The free event will include lunch.

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Glenn Hunter and her siblings knew little about their roots beyond that. Grandparents on both sides died before the children had any memory of them.

Yet those eight children from a three-room shack in Lithonia went on to solidly middle-class lives that included serving as mayor, city council members and police chief in Lithonia.

“I knew it had to be in the genes,” said Glenn Hunter, 63, a retired federal government employee who served 23 years on the council and as mayor in Lithonia before stepping down in 1994.

After a decade of drawing on faded death and marriage certificates and old census and slave records, Glenn Hunter traced her ancestors back to Samuel Wood, a slave born in 1790 in Africa and then brought to work a plantation in Newton County.

The landowner, Cary Wood, kept families together and encouraged marriage. It was to his benefit to increase his number of slaves that way, but it was also fortunate for Glenn Hunter.

The documents recorded how every generation from him on advanced. Slave to sharecropper. Sharecropper to landowner. Farm hand to quarryman to factory worker.

All the way to pedigreed and bedrock family in the tiny southeastern DeKalb city.

“That is an American thing, but it’s also a very African-American thing, to stress how important it is to get an education, to strive for what America has to offer,” said Jerome Woods, 69, the brother who retired as police chief. “It’s wonderful to see where we come from, and how we got to where we are.”

More and more people agree. Ancestry.com, which helps track genealogy records, reports more than 15 million users.

DNA tracing is even more popular among African-Americans, who are often left without other records of their history.

Emory University has launched a Web database that relies on business documents from the 300-year slave trade to help people find where in Africa their ancestors originated.

Glenn Hunter has not used the site and knows only that Samuel Wood was born in Africa, according to the 1870 Census. That was the first time Southern blacks were counted.

“If you can trace a captive back to a particular port, the database can show you at the minimum where captives at that time were coming from in Africa,” said David Eltis, a history professor that heads the Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.org). “They were human chattel, so as property, the records were just better.”

The records for the Wood clan are somewhat remarkable in that respect. Glenn Hunter can event point to the Census — 1930 — when a bureaucrat mistakenly changed the family name from Wood to Woods.

More important were the death records that included parents’ names and the fortunate for their slaveholder to never sell his property.

“We were able to stay together, and I think you see that today in the strength in family we have,” said Barbara Lester, 73, the sister who served as a city councilwoman and still attends nearly every meeting.

Maggie Woods, now 93, is too old to travel, but the great-great-great-great grandchildren of Samuel Wood are now talking about pushing to find just where in Africa he was from, so they can go there themselves.

Glenn Hunter believes that would only be fair, since her research took her to the old graves for the ancestors on her mother’s side. The records stop for them in the 1820s.

“They worked, and they worked hard, for what they had. We want to continue that legacy and honor that sacrifice,” Glenn Hunter said. “We made it in this country, despite being in shackles at the bottom of a slave ship. I understand my thirst now.”