Georgetown’s priests sold her Catholic ancestors. Then she found out in an unexpected way.

[rug]

Patricia Bayonne-Johnson holds a photo of her great grandparents and their son. The retired science teacher cracked the mystery of what happened to the descendants of the slaves Georgetown sold. In 1838, Georgetown sold 272 slaves to clear its debt. (Nick Otto For The Washington Post)

By Terrence McCoy
June 17

Patricia Bayonne-Johnson’s family members never talked much about their history. Some were perhaps afraid of what they would find if they dug too deep. For decades, questions about who her ancestors were, where they came from, and details of their lives went unanswered.

That changed on a spring day in 2004. Bayonne-Johnson, who grew up in New Orleans but was then living in Berkeley, Calif., had asked a genealogist to find answers for an upcoming reunion. And the inquiry’s results, in an envelope, had arrived.

The package bore four documents. The first two described sales. Her ancestors had been sold, she learned, from one slave master to the next, across Louisiana in the mid-1800s. The next document enumerated an inventory of slaves belonging to one of them.

The last document was the oldest. It offered an even greater surprise: The origins of Bayonne-Johnson’s family didn’t lay in Louisiana, but in Maryland. They came South by way of a sale orchestrated by one of Maryland’s leading Jesuit priests in 1838. That man, Thomas Mulledy, then the president of Georgetown University, had sold 272 slaves to pay off a massive debt strangling the university.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/06/17/georgetowns-priests-sold-her-ancestors-into-slavery-heres-how-she-cracked-the-mystery/



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/us/moving-to-make-amends-georgetown-president-meets-with-descendant-of-slaves.html