College Uses Genealogy as a Recruitment Tool

Colleges have tried many tactics to attract capable minority students and make them feel welcome. They’ve offered scholarships, started support groups, hired counselors, overlooked low test scores.

At Gettysburg College, they’re about to try genealogy.

Starting in March, this Lutheran-affiliated liberal arts school, where just 40 of 1,850 students are black, is opening an “intercultural resource center” where all students, but especially African-Americans, can learn how to research their roots.

The two-story, wood-frame center, when dedicated at a March 18 ceremony, will coordinate a campus-wide effort to help minority students develop self-awareness and confidence.

The ultimate aim: to break down the isolation that blacks often feel on this campus; to help them be part of the mainstream; and eventually to use their self-awareness to strive for leadership roles.

Packed With Records

Already, the center’s shelves are packed with census records from 40 states, dating to the early 1800s. Thick brown volumes contain ship passenger and immigration lists dating to the 18th Century. There also are genealogy guides for Germans, Italians, American Indians, Danes, Finns, Russians and English.

“I don’t know that much about myself, and I want to know,” said Dawn Hadnott, 17, a freshman from Teaneck, N.J. “I think I have some Indian in me: my great-grandmother Moan.”

“I think there’s a lack of pride in the black community,” said Troy Datcher, a 20-year-old junior who is president of the Black Student Union. “I think it can be rebuilt with a program like this. Maybe you can find out that you were related to someone famous.”

At a time of racial tension on many other campuses, Gettysburg’s aim is to foster toleration through appreciation and knowledge of cultural diversity, says Harry Bradshaw Matthews, the school’s 37-year-old “dean of intercultural advancement.”

If black students know more about themselves, the reasoning goes, they will be better prepared as minorities to fit into a college environment, and more inclined to stay the full four years. They also might be inclined to spread the word to their friends.

Thousands of Items

The new Gettysburg center is unusual on several counts. Probably no other school so small has focused such attention on African-American genealogy, said James Dent Walker, a founder of the Washington-based Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society. Temple University in Philadelphia houses the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American collection, which contains more than 40,000 items.

Gettysburg also pointedly chose not to name its facility an Afro-American Center or Black Student Center, as many colleges have, reasoning it was to be a campus place celebrating all cultures.

Gettysburg may be the first college to view genealogy as a vehicle for recruiting and retaining minority students. That strategy may lack the glitz or quick-fix appeal of setting numerical minority recruitment goals or quotas as other colleges have, but Gettysburg never did.

Matthews says he has already used his approach successfully as a minority counselor at two other predominantly white campuses, Northern Michigan University and the affiliated Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y.

Now he confidently predicts: “Gettysburg will end up with a name across the United States, as a place for the advancement of African-American and other minority students.”

Yet Gettysburg seems hardly the most fertile place for an innovative approach to black student recruitment, despite its location adjacent to the Civil War battlefield where Abraham Lincoln delivered his address that became an anthem in the history of race relations.

‘All Too True’

College guides, such as the “Yale Insider’s Guide,” have described Gettysburg students as “all alike,” and “white and upper middle class.” The descriptions are “all too true,” president Charles Glassick admits.

Black students at the school say that while seldom the target of overt racism, they often feel shunned and isolated.

“Most students here never interacted with blacks, and at Gettysburg it’s possible to avoid that,” said Michael Warren, a 22-year-old senior majoring in African-American studies.

“We were frankly interested in enrolling more minority students. So we brought in Harry Matthews,” Glassick said.

Fewer than 100 blacks were applying to Gettysburg each year, and the retention rate of those who attend had been “abominable,” said Glassick. The rate was 46% in the 1970s, though that has recently improved to around 73%.

Even with warm backing by the president and trustees, Matthews’ arrival at Gettysburg in 1985 was not greeted with universal joy.

“Did I feel welcome? No. It was a challenge,” he said. “Some in the faculty and administration were looking for a more radical guy.”

Some called the conservatively dressed, soft-spoken Matthews an “Uncle Tom.” Others wondered aloud why he and his ideas were worth scarce college dollars when they seemed geared to so few students.

But when the college spent $450,000 to buy the building that eventually housed the center, it became clear to all that the center, and Matthews, were here to stay.

Matthews says he faced the same jolt that other black college students often find so trying. He grew up in Roosevelt, Long Island, a New York suburb where the public schools are mostly black. He wanted to attend historically black Fisk University but wound up at the mostly white State University of New York at Oneonta where financial aid was more generous.

In 1977, the popularity of “Roots,” the book and television miniseries by Alex Haley, sparked his passion for genealogy. “When ‘Roots’ came out, I made a pledge to trace my family before I had children,” he said, a vow he has kept.

Eleven years of subsequent research led him to discover ancestors dating to the American Revolution. He believes his oldest ancestor was a Freedman known as Isaac the African who served in the 3rd Regiment of South Carolina.

A Starting Point

The resource center will only be the starting point for such research. Students wanting to delve into their past still must go to the National Archives in Washington, talk to relatives, check state and county records of births, retirement records, marriage certificates and property deeds, just as any genealogist would.

Eventually, Matthews hopes, the center will sponsor trips to archives in Washington and elsewhere.

Genealogy is especially formidable for blacks. Census data are helpful only to 1870. It’s almost impossible for most blacks to discover their ancestral Kunta Kinte, the character in “Roots” captured in Africa and brought to America on a slave ship.

What may be possible, though difficult, is to trace lineage before 1870 by studying white slaveholding families. With black genealogy, Matthews said, “you just can’t get around white folks. It’s the only way.”