By Shauna Scott Rhone
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Sylvia Faulkner and her daughter, Yael, with a 1930s photo of Mamie and Louis Kidd, who raised Faulkner's father. (Jeff Swinger photo) | ZOOM |

Sylvia Faulkner is looking for her relatives, as far back into America's history as she can.

She knows where her father is, unwinding the thread of his remaining days at a group home in Mount Healthy.

But when this 36-year-old woman looks at William Faulkner's 79-year-old face, she sees untold stories. His family history is her history, too, and she wants to know it.

Some days, she says, he clearly remembers some of his past, and days when his time-weary face contorts, facts tangled in fading memory. He has a form of Alzheimer's disease. She fears the day will come soon when her questions to him about their family will be met with a blank stare.

So she searches. Faulkner, like thousands of African-American families, was inspired by stories revealed during Black History Month. They want to uncover their own history, to reconstruct their family tree. Sylvia Faulkner wants to do this for herself and for her 11-year-old daughter, Yael.

Karen Beiser helps those looking for ancestors. (Craig Ruttle photo) | ZOOM |

"I want her to know where she came from," says Faulkner, an East Walnut Hills resident. "I want to know, too."

She started searching last year. But the vast amount of genealogical information at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County downtown was overwhelming and frustrating to tackle alone.

"I got all the names wrong," she says, "and I gave up."

This year, Faulkner decided to try again, for Yael. That's how she met Karen Beiser, who is an assistant manager in the library's history and genealogy department, and is a tour guide to America's past.

Beiser is also a witness to others from around the world who have come to the Main Library to search for their ancestors.

The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County is considered a mother lode of information on families of all origins. Family Tree magazine last year named it one of the top 10 public libraries in the nation for genealogical research. The genealogy department holds more than 100,000 books, 1,500 periodicals, 50,000 microfiches, and more than 12,000 family histories.

RESOURCES

The Main Branch of the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library can provide: Materials • Plantation records on 1,634 reels of microfilm, including slave registers, family groups, descriptions of slaves, freedom papers, runaway advertisements and Freedman's Bureau records. • African-American magazines and newspapers with current and historical coverage, including Index to Black Periodicals (1950-present). • Histories of African-American military regiments as well as records of the U.S. Colored Troops from the Civil War. • Historical materials on African-Americans in Cincinnati. • Cincinnati city maps (1847-present). • Genealogies of African-American families. • The Works Progress Administration's slave narratives: interviews conducted during the Great Depression with former slaves. These narratives were used in the recent HBO special, Unchained Memories. • 1930 Census on microfilm for the following states: Alaska, American Samoa and Guam, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Panama Canal and Consular, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia (other state records will arrive this year). Books • Black Biography, the most complete index to African American biographical dictionaries with full test of 297 works, covering nearly 31,000 names. • Selected titles from the New York-based Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The Library also suggests: • Family History Resources at the Public Library • African-American Lives on Video Other Tristate resource sites • Family History Centers, run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (www.familysearch.org), in Norwood (531-5624), Clermont County (753-3464), Sycamore Township (489-3036) and Lakeside Park (859-341-3866). Hours vary by location, so call before you visit. • Kenton County Public Library (www.kenton.lib.ky.us) has an extensive local history collection at its Covington location (859-962-4060). Three computers are set aside for genealogists and onsite access to ancestry.com. • Lane Libraries in Hamilton (www.lanepl.org and 513-523-3035) has census indexes for Ohio and Indiana, cemetery and church records and Oxford phone directories. Its Smith Library of Regional History in Oxford has information on Oxford and Butler County.

SEARCH TOOLS

Karen Beiser, assistant manager of history and genealogy at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, offers these suggestions for basic information you should have before starting a genealogical search: • Some specific names of the people you're looking for. If possible, given names and last names. Legal documents such as city directories won't contain nicknames. • If you have no specific dates for such things as births, marriages or deaths, at least have some idea of a time period you want to start in (to help narrow your search). • If you don't know the city or county of a life event (birth, marriage or death), the library can help you work with state records, but that's harder. Most data is sorted by year and location. For example, if you're looking for ancestors in the mid- or late 1800s, the library would have access to many county genealogy books, cemetery index books, marriage indexes, land or tax records. For records on African-Americans in the 1800s, the library has these titles, which are now out of print: • Black Baltimore, 1820-1870 by Ralph Clayton includes an index of free black households . . . from the census schedules of 1820, 1830 and 1840. • District of Columbia Free Negro Registers, 1821-1861 by Dorothy S. Provine, mainly lists of manumissions and certificates of freedom, such as "Clare Milburn . . . manumits (meaning emancipates) Henry Thomas, who is about 43 (20 May 1856)." • Free African Americans of North Carolina and Virginia, which includes the family histories of more than 80 percent of those counted as "all other free persons" in the 1790 and 1800 census in those states.

The recent release of the 1930 U.S. Census is a boon to African-American genealogists. This comprehensive snapshot of America reveals entire neighborhoods remembered by living relatives from front-porch stories told long ago.

The 1930 complete census date became fully accessible to the public only recently because of an earlier act of Congress stipulating that a release 72 years after the report was completed would protect privacy. Since life spans are considerably longer than they were in 1930, many people counted are still alive.

Even though many are able to locate their living relatives using Census data, Beiser admits not all are successful. "It sometimes takes a long, long time," she says. But those who succeed usually are delighted with their findings.

"I love it when people come here interested in genealogy," Beiser says. "Someone will be sitting still at a microfiche reader and suddenly shout out, `There's my grandfather!' I just get chills when that happens. It makes people so happy to find their relatives."

Faulkner wants that feeling.

Overwhelmed and excited by the possibilities, Faulkner looks around at other library patrons staring intently into computer screens. She clutches handwritten notes taken during her last visit with her father. Written memories she hopes could be clues in her search. Already she knows about one obstacle that might thwart the search.

Her father believes he was adopted.

"I know he was born in Columbia, South Carolina," Faulkner says confidently. But family members she's talked to don't know for sure whether he was legally adopted or whether he was born in 1922 or 1923. Either way, he was alive when the 1930 Census was taken.

She also doesn't know how old her father was when Mamie Kidd took him in. Kidd, a family friend, stepped in to care for William after his mother demonstrated an inability to cope with parenting, according to family lore. She offered to raise William, and his mother agreed.

A few years later, Mamie and little William moved to Cincinnati. She eventually married Louis Kidd when Faulkner was a teenager.

"He talks about a sister sometimes," says Faulkner, "but I don't know her."

This was all the information Faulkner was able to get from her father about his early life. Time is closing the windows of opportunity to find what she needs to search for her father's side of the family.

`She'll come around'

On a recent trip to the library, as Sylvia Faulkner and Beiser discuss strategy, daughter Yael wanders off to surf the Internet.

"She acts like she's not interested," Faulkner says, "but at home she's been asking me a lot of questions about this. She'll come around."

Faulkner decides to start by looking at city directories from 1930 Columbia, S.C. Names fly by under her fingers as she searches for Mamie and Louis Kidd.

One age-yellowed page shows two listings under Kidd, but they are not the names Faulkner's looking for.

Beiser suggests the 1930 Census might give some clues. She pulls down two thick, heavy reference books with black textured covers. Faulkner trolls through the pages to find a coded number matching the microfilm index for the South Carolina Census.

Faulkner quickly writes down the information and hands it to Beiser, who submits the request to a library page working in the library's cramped storage area. The room is filled floor-to-ceiling with historic maps and oversized atlases and thousands of small white boxes, containing millions of names on microfilm.

Unfortunately, Beiser says, the news is not good. The Census records for South Carolina, on order by the library, are not available. Faulkner, by now used to hitting brick walls, thinks of another route.

"What about Ohio?" she asks. "Maybe they were in Cincinnati by 1930."

Another trip to the storage area brings out another set of microfiche. The Cincinnati city directory for 1930 is not in book form; it has been preserved on microfilm. Not only does this preserve the integrity of the record, but makes it durable for years to come.

The decades-old microfiche reader whirrs loudly as Faulkner searches for her father's surrogate mother. The directory reveals a possible lead: the Kidds lived in what is now downtown Cincinnati. Now that Faulkner has an address, she can go to the 1930 Census and track them to their front porch.

Census records are listed by the districts covered by census takers, called enumerators, who conducted a door-to-door city population count. The district's assigned number and the enumerator's number tells genealogists where to look for information on the microfilm roll.

Faulkner fills out the Census Request form and, minutes later, another box turns into a stepping stone. She beams with excitement at her good fortune and heads back to the microfiche reader.

Halfway through the reel, her eyes lock on a name: William Faulkner. At first, she thinks it may be her grandfather's name until she looks at the age.

Faulkner is actually looking at her father. He's 6 years old, living with Mamie Dennis (before she married Louis), Mamie's aunt Lilly Jackson and Marian Lyles, a 9-year-old girl listed as Mamie's cousin.

"It's him! It's him!" Faulkner cries out and rushes to bring her daughter to the machine.

Significant discovery

Yael peers into the screen and finds her grandfather's name. William has always been an old man in his granddaughter's eyes. Now, she saw evidence that he was once a little boy, growing up on West Fifth Street, with two women who took in laundry during the Depression to enable them to afford to rent and keep up their $15-a-month home.

The daughter's fear that she might not find her father if he had been adopted had been erased. He was listed in 1930 as a Faulkner; his name hadn't been changed.

The next day, Faulkner visited her father to show him what she had found. He was elated and fascinated by the copy of the Census roster she handed him. His name, along with the others, is carefully handwritten by a woman who walked door-to-door in downtown Cincinnati in April of 1930, briefly stopping time to document history.

"He told me, `I want to know more. I want you to find out everything you can, quickly.' "

Faulkner wants badly to help his daughter fill in some of the branches on their family tree. His fleeting memory is a painful reminder of just how quickly Alzheimer's is closing their door to the past.

William Faulkner will turn 80 in July. His daughter wants to give him his complete family tree as a birthday gift.

"I'm determined to keep looking," she says. "Now he wants to know about his grandfather."

Fortune has given them both a crucial key: the 1930 Census for South Carolina arrived at the Main Library three days after Sylvia Faulkner started searching for her father.

Now she's looking for another William Faulkner: her grandfather.

The History and Genealogy Department at the Main Library offers orientation classes for would-be genealogists. Reservations are not required; for information call 369-6905.

E-mail srhone@enquirer.com