Finding Otho: The Search for Our Enslaved Williams Ancestors

Until she was 19 years old, Kathy Lynne Marshall loved everything about her African roots and culture. When she discovered her European ancestry through a DNA test, she began an intensive search to learn the full truth about her family lineage. Kathy knew that her maternal great-great-grandfather, Otho Williams, was born a slave in 1834 in Maryland. She wanted answers to other questions: Who were his parents? Who owned him and what was his life like almost 200 years ago?

She read biographies of runaway slaves and researched stories about Maryland in the 1700s and 1800s. The Civil War Battle of Antietam, where 23,000 men died in one day, occurred within miles of her ancestral home. She sifted through hundreds of bills of sale, land deeds, probate and census records to learn first-hand where and how her mixed race family lived. In Finding Otho: The Search for Our Enslaved Williams Ancestors, Kathy braids the reality of Otho's life with facts and historical record. The man who emerges is one we will not soon forget.

This book includes a guide to writing your family history.

Kathy Lynne Marshall, the Black Ancestor Biographer, is a Diversity and Inclusion Specialist on behalf of our ancestors. Her books and workshops restore the American Historical Record by adding highly-researched accounts of enslaved African Americans. Kathy has addressed the Sons and Daughters of the U.S. Middle Passage conference and consulted for West Virginia's Beverly Heritage Center.