Debra Bruno, A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024
As her title suggests, Debra Bruno’s “reckoning” had to do with her coming to terms with the fact that her revered ancestors in the seventeen-century Hudson Valley were slave owners. At first disbelieving and denying, then gradually persuaded of the truth, her research methods are as honed as any historian’s, and she tells the story in an engaging and conversational manner.
Her persusasion comes about when as member of what she comes to consider her “slave family” contacted her out of the blue to identify herself and to offer Debra her help, if it was welcome.
It was very welcome, and together Eleanore C. Mire and Debra Bruno uncover their ancestors from the earliest they can find to reconstruct the generations, Black and White. This they do by first hiring a professional genealogist, and then painstakingly and laboriously in church records, family records, genealogies, census records, cemeteries, and printed county histories. The sleuthing is made more difficult by their discovery that throughout is a common thread: enslaved people’s experiences were overlooked, indeed erased almost methodically, from history.
One of the most poignant moments in this search is when Debra and Eleanor visit the NY State Historical Museum in Cooperstown, NY, to view the Van Bergen Overmantel. “The tiny dark woman in the white dress tossing grain to the chickens could have been the ancestor of Eleanor. . . .The white man and woman standing in front of the house were almost certainly mine,” Debra, a Van Bergen herself, writes.
The book is strongly recommended to all who love investigatory researching, an engrossing story, and Hudson Valley color in particular.
Availabe here on Amazon.
