photo by: Contributed

Members of the Rice-Byrd family met for the first time in person in Lawrence last weekend for a family reunion. They're pictured here with Kerry Altenbernd, who performs first-person interpretations of abolitionist John Brown, at Grover Barn, which played a significant role as a stop in the Underground Railroad in pre-Civil War Kansas.

Last weekend in Lawrence, a group of family members descended from the freed slave who for a time operated the only tannery in Kansas, McCarter Byrd, met in person for the first time.

The roughly 30 folks who congregated in Lawrence came from far and wide — from places like California, Florida, Nebraska and Illinois — to connect with and get to know the community that they’ve now discovered is an important place in their family’s rich history.

Only a few decades ago, however, this reunion wouldn’t have been possible. The two sides of the family at one point lived in the same Wisconsin city. But instead of distance, they were separated by segregation. One of McCarter Byrd’s daughters had a son with a white man, creating a new branch of the family that until recently was unaware of its roots. As a result, two sides of the same family — one white and one Black — were living simultaneously on opposite sides of Milwaukee from the 1930s through the 1960s, never knowing of their nearby kin.

photo by: Courtesy of Richard Rice, Sr.

McCarter Byrd

The story of the Rice-Byrd family is at once both a story of the ugly history of American racism and of a modern-day yearning to find familial roots. It’s also the tale of how unraveling a family secret has inspired the members of that family to educate others about the importance of confronting racism and working to understand one another.

Piecing together a family tree

For Richard Rice Sr., this was all part of a discovery decades in the making. About 40 years ago, his aunt put together a rough family tree, but Rice noticed some missing pieces. It was harder to fill in those blanks before the internet, but Rice still tried to search for information about some of the names on the family tree from year to year.

“Growing up, the only thing I knew about my family was that my grandmother, who helped raise me and was one of McCarter Byrd’s daughters, her family owned a tannery in Lawrence,” Rice, who’s now 76, said. “That’s all I knew.”

photo by: Contributed

Byrd Tannery as it looked in 1915 is pictured.

His grandfather, Eli Rice, was also from Lawrence, and he married and ended up settling in Oshkosh, Wisconsin where family members like Richard’s father, uncle and aunts were born.

About five years ago, everything changed. That’s when Rice, who now lives in Los Angeles, came across a Facebook post from the Guardians of Grover Barn, a volunteer organization formed in Lawrence in 2017 dedicated to protecting and preserving the historic stone barn at 2819 Stonebarn Terrace, which was built in 1858 by abolitionists Joel and Emily Grover. The barn would go on to play a significant role as a stop in the Underground Railroad in pre-Civil War Kansas. The post included a short biography of McCarter Byrd detailing his life in Lawrence after moving from North Carolina, where he was born a slave in March of 1849.

Rice said that post, along with clippings of Lawrence Journal-World articles dating back as far as 1915, stitched together to tell the story of his great-grandfather. From there, more internet searches and DNA tests linked Rice to members of the family he’d never met before.

“(It connected me to) dozens,” Rice said. “McCarter had a number of daughters and only one son, and I traced family members from each of his children that had children.”

Those extended searches also revealed the family’s secret — that two sides of the family had been segregated from one another for years. Rice said while it was hard to believe at first, he discovered photographs of his great-aunts with the Black side of the family and with the white side of the family. The families never connected at the time, though.

“I understand why,” Rice said. “If the white side of the family had revealed that they were really descendants of slaves, their lives would’ve been different. They would not have been able to live where they lived in Milwaukee, job opportunities would’ve been less and so on.”

Filling in the blanks

Rice played a key role in uniting the branches of the Rice-Byrd family tree, but he said it wouldn’t have been possible without the help of one individual in Lawrence — Judy Sweets, a genealogical researcher who plays an active role with the Guardians of Grover Barn. Sweets told the Journal-World a moment of “serendipity” led the two to connect. She was the one who authored the Facebook post highlighting McCarter Byrd, which was originally part of a series of daily posts on the page in honor of Black History Month.

Not long after that, Rice reached out. It was the first time he’d found any detailed information about his great-grandfather besides that he was born in North Carolina.

“Then, it was kind of amazing to watch that Facebook page after he contacted me,” Sweets said. “All these other people started coming out of the woodwork. They were contacting each other, saying ‘Oh, am I related to him, too?’ They were just getting so excited, and I’d say every 15 seconds people were posting another post. They had no idea McCarter Byrd was their great-grandfather, or their great-great-grandfather.”

That connection came full circle last Friday, when Sweets led the family in an orientation on the first day of their reunion at Grover Barn. She said it was wonderful to see them mingling and getting to know each other.

It’s not the first time Sweets has played a role in linking the far-flung members of a family together. She said in one instance in the 1990s, she helped a family find their sibling who’d been adopted at birth. The Journal-World also reported in 2002 that Sweets helped a couple from Hull, England, trace their roots to a Lawrence abolitionist named John Doy.

“It’s one of the highlights of my life to be able to offer that or do that for someone,” Sweets said on Friday. “… It’s a lot of fun to do, and I enjoy the research. This has been great. Everyone looked pretty happy today.”

Exploring their roots

The Rice-Byrd family descendants arrived in Lawrence the night of Thursday, June 8, and their next three days were packed with activities. After the orientation at Grover Barn Friday, June 9, they were able to take their pick of tours and visits to a number of sites, such as the homes of family members like Lucy Byrd, McCarter Byrd’s wife, or the furrier business of Cornelia Byrd, one of the great-aunts who kept contact with both the white and Black sides of the family.

On Saturday, June 10, the family was able to get a look at the last remaining vestige of Byrd Tannery, a stone stable building on Maine Street. The building is privately owned, but the family hopes it will one day become a historical landmark. They also viewed the family’s cemetery plot at Oak Hill Cemetery and were joined by Kansas Rep. Barbara Ballard at their family banquet at the Eldridge Hotel.

photo by: Contributed

Today, the last remaining vestige of Byrd Tannery is this stone stable building on Maine St.

photo by: Contributed

Stephanie Byrd, Melanie Byrd, Holly Smith, Mary Ellen Byrd and William Byrd pose for a photo with Kansas Rep. Barbara Ballard. Ballard joined the family during a banquet at the Eldridge Hotel as part of their family reunion.

But last Sunday’s activity may have been the most impactful item on the itinerary. The family visited Ninth Street Missionary Baptist Church, which itself is a key fixture from McCarter Byrd’s era of Lawrence history that recently celebrated its 160th anniversary. The family knew McCarter Byrd had been a member of the church’s congregation, but they weren’t prepared to stumble across a stained glass window etched with his name.

“Today was just so mind-blowing, overwhelming to know that we were worshiping right exactly where he worshiped, where he was in the sanctuary, where he was a deacon,” Maria King, a member of the family from Roscoe, Illinois, said Sunday afternoon. “We were there. That was the most amazing thing that has happened to me this entire weekend, other than meeting my family.”

photo by: Holly Smith

McCarter Byrd’s name is memorialized in one of the stained glass windows at Ninth Street Missionary Baptist Church. Members of the Rice-Byrd family didn’t know it was there until attending a church service as part of their family reunion activities last weekend.

The congregation of today, as it turns out, didn’t know anything about McCarter Byrd until the family shared what they knew with them. Robyn Rice Olmstead, a member of the family from Oakland, California, echoed how overwhelming it felt to discover. She called it “another little piece of the puzzle” of the family’s history.

‘We have become one’

King and Rice Olmstead were among the 16 family members who spoke with the Journal-World Sunday afternoon before departing Lawrence. For many of them, it was an emotional conversation. Some, like William Byrd of Lincoln, Nebraska, were brought to tears at the realization that Cornelia Byrd — his aunt — had been such a beloved figure on both sides of the family tree.

Mary Ellen Byrd, from Detroit, described how the past few days had been filled with plenty of laughter and shared tears. Byrd said the family has become emboldened in their desire to preserve their shared history and help others learn how important it is to trace back their own family lines.

“I wish more people would do their ancestry and say ‘We’re all one,'” Byrd said. “… I think if more people did their ancestry and discovered, ‘Oh, I can’t really criticize that person — they are my brother, or they are my sister,’ we wouldn’t have some of the issues we’re having in terms of people being pulled over just for driving while Black or being attacked by suspicion just because they’re walking in a hoodie.”

Holly Smith, who also lives in Lincoln, was on the younger end of the spectrum of family members who traveled to Lawrence for the reunion at 26. Smith said growing up, it always felt like there was something missing. They said the reunion connected the dots and made them feel “whole.”

“(Our family) history is really important not only to Lawrence but to all of America, and I want that history to be saved and remembered and passed on so that way, history doesn’t repeat,” Smith said. “… I just think it’s really beautiful and I’m so happy that I got to meet everybody here.”

That was a similar sentiment shared among many members of the Rice-Byrd family — that their story is clearly meant to educate. Some, like Richard Rice Jr., spoke about how their family roots served as an active lesson in not judging a book by its cover. Rice Jr. talked about how he has experienced casual racism throughout his life because he is white-passing. That’s meant working with friends to confront and understand their stereotypes after learning he’s Black and wrestling with the internal and external pressures of his racial identity.

Paula Cannon, of Murrieta, California, said she was initially reluctant to travel to Lawrence and wasn’t sure what she’d gain by being there. But the lesson she learned by coming and forging a closer relationship with her family members was that the color of their skin doesn’t matter.

“I think that this family reunion, if it has done nothing else, it has broken the mold of what the expectations of racial interactions could be, should be or have been in the past,” Cannon said. “We have become one. I didn’t come here looking to meet my white cousins, my Black cousins — I just came to meet my family. Just in meeting each and every one, everyone’s given something different.”

Rice Sr. said that’s an especially important message, given the conflict unfolding in state and national politics regarding what’s appropriate to teach students about America’s history of racism. He said the family still has plenty of work to do to learn even more about their ancestors, but they plan to keep at it.

“As we’ve gone through this process, especially in light of some states that are trying to make illegal the history that we’re trying to uncover, it’s important for us to document our own history,” Rice Sr. said.