During my teenage years, I remember my Aunt Verlie proudly telling me that we were related to George Washington. Much, much later my education taught me he did not father any children so we couldn't be biologically related to ole George.
Decades later doing family history research, I found out that the Washington surname is considered one of the top names the formally enslaved chose as a surname after emancipation. Some articles even reported that WASHINGTON was the "Blackest name in America". According to the 2000 U.S. Census there were 163,036 people counted that year with the surname WASHINGTON and ninety percent of them identified as African American -- this was a higher percentage than any other surname.
It seems that my family chose the surname WASHINGTON after enslavement. which was the surname of Ned's wife, Darkas. Ned's mother Sylvia first used the surname Adair, and later Washington. In my blog post Connecting to An Enslaved Ancestor -- Sylvia Adair Washington I show the connection of my 3rd great-grandmother and her enslaver.
My Maternal WASHINGTON family line
My research was validated when I found the hand-written research notes of my Aunt Verlie about our Washington family line on 3-ring loose leaf paper. (1) On this sheet, she has circled "last name Adel was changed" (should be Adair). There is a spelling variation that I attribute to the time lapse in the telling or perhaps the teller never knew how to spell Adair. (2) In the margin Aunt Verlie indicated that her great-grandmother, Dorkie Washington and her great-grandfather, Ned Washington were slaves and that she checked. There is a spelling variation in the name Dorkie (it's Darkas on her death certificate) but her death date is the same as what I have found. Initially, Aunt Verlie wrote her great-grandparents as her maternal family -- which they were, so this leads me to believe that she was interviewing her mother, Lucy Washington Brown. Ned and Dorkie Washington would have been the paternal grandparents of Lucy Washington Brown but the maternal great-grandparents of my Aunt Verlie.
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| Notes from research on Washington family by Verlie Mae Brown Walton, date unknown (expanded top portion from full page below) |
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| Notes (full page) from research on Washington family by Verlie Mae Brown Walton, date unknown |
When my aunt made transition in 2021, my brother, Ray and I cleaned out her house. We found a number of these hand-written pages on our family history. Unfortunately, my aunt was very secretive about her family history research, and I had asked her many, many times about it. Maybe now she is guiding me to build on what I have been able to find and document.
WASHINGTON surname articles
Washington, Eric. "The Irony of the 'Blackest Name In America'". Historical Horizons, February 26, 2016.
Washington, Jesse. "Washington: the 'blackest name' in America". NBC News: The Associated Press, February 21, 2011.
