They were led by Natalie Diggs’ only son, Richard, a retired captain with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. Other members of the family picked up the task. But she hadn’t made much progress by the time she died in 2005. Natalie Diggs rebound the book and spent the next two decades using the Bible’s notes as a guide to build her family tree. “And that she was this close to just getting rid of it.” Natalie “was amazed because she had no idea that that Bible had been on her patio all of that time,” said Carlotta Diggs. Most enslaved people were not literate and records documenting their existence were produced by slaveholders who emphasized their financial value over their humanity, Stevenson said. “It is not particularly common for African American families to find artifacts from the era of enslavement,” said Brenda Stevenson, a historian at the University of Oxford. The federal government did not record their names until its 1870 census, a lack of documentation that, when coupled with other racist policies, has left empty branches on many family trees. That is a rare feat for most African Americans because enslaved people were deemed property in much of the country until the end of the Civil War and emancipation. ![]() His neat script provided the clues necessary for Diggs and her brother to trace their lineages back to the shores of Africa. ![]() In its pages, the family found notes from an enslaved, literate ancestor who documented five generations of births, deaths and marriages. ![]() The Bible’s humble journey to the Smithsonian began long before the Diggs’ family discovered it in San Bernardino more than three decades ago - in a box of books set to be donated to charity. “As long as people are talking about you after you pass, you never really leave.” Now that her ancestor’s Bible is on display in one of America’s most esteemed museums, she added, “it feels like he’ll live on, and our story will live on.” And it’s legible, not destroyed hard to read,” Diggs said later. “It’s pretty amazing to me, that it got here and that we still have it.
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