Family People
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Hello, I am Louisa Miller, though I go by the name Lulu.

And I'm Latif Shiraz Abdul Fazal Nasser Balu. And here... Is that... That's my full name. Wait, was that true? That is my full name. It is stately and ringy and wonderful. Yeah, it's my name, my dad's name, his dad's name, his dad's name, his dad's... It's basically, it's all the dad's names. Okay. And anyway, here at Radiolab...

We are talking about this because we kind of are a little obsessed with names, it turns out. Yeah, it just keeps coming up. In addition to the six-part series, you did a lot of about sharing a name with a Guantanamo detainee.

We have done stories about names that make computers go haywire. Names that seem to influence a certain life path. Like a study that shows that if you're named Dennis, you're more likely to become a dentist. But today we have a very different kind of name story because our editor, Alex Neeson, recently got some kind of confusing news about her name. You see these wasps?

Be careful. And this news sent Alex on a kind of odyssey. Ooh, I'm stepping in mud. Ooh, it is squishy. Down to New Orleans, where she sloshed and slogged. Right. Through swampy cemeteries. Some of these headstones, you can't even make them out because they're just so old and weathered. Sweaty basement archives. Yeah, nothing. Yeah. Trying to pin down where her name came from. And...

Not only did Alex take that search further than anyone thought possible, she ended up confronting a much deeper question. Is your name just an arbitrary string of letters pinned to you at birth? Or is it the thing that can help you see yourself and how to move forward in life most clearly? Hello, hello? Can you hear me? Why are you so blurry? I don't know, the internet.

Okay. And we're going to start off. I'm just going to have you introduce yourself. With the person who gave Alex her name. Clarence Easton Jr. I'm an Army veteran. I'm a retired U.S. Army colonel. And your relationship to me. You're my daughter, my oldest daughter. So my name was this big character in my life as a kid. And one of the things I used to tell you and your sister, hey, that's my name. That's not your name. It's on lease. The thing you say like basically once a day. Yeah, yeah, right. So, I mean, because...

It is important, right? I grew up in a military family. My dad was in the army. You know, 28 years of my life in the army. We moved around a lot. Didn't have like a traditional hometown. And I think I had...

A lot of anxieties as a kid about, like, not having roots. Part of that's, like, being in the military where everything is your last name. Your last name and your last four, right? So in the military, your name is sort of you. People are addressed by their last name. Living on base, your name goes on the outside of your house. On ours, it always said Team Neeson. I saw it every day on my dad's uniform when he would get up and go to work.

Your identity comes completely absorbed into your last name. I make sure that my name has value to me. And then as you and your sister were growing up, transfer that to you so that you can understand that, hey, look,

take care of this name. This is what I got. This is something that I own as my identity. And I just totally internalized that sense of connection to my name. And, you know, I have a nameplate ring. It says Neeson. I never take this thing off. Certain friends, I'm not known as Alex. I'm just known as Neeson. It's just a deep part of how I think about myself in the world. And then about a year and a half ago, all of that got blown up. In 2021, my grandfather died

My dad's dad, Clarence Neeson Sr., he passed away. And he lived in New Orleans, which is where my dad and his whole family are from. And this was, you know, peak COVID. So I wasn't able to go to the funeral, but my parents went. And they brought me back a program from the funeral that has like the obituary and everything. It's got my grandpa's name and his birthday, and it lists who his parents were. And so it says, I'm just going to read it to you.

Our beloved Reverend Dr. Clarence Neeson Sr., Sanko, Daddy, Papa, Uncle, Rev, Doc, those are nicknames, entered this world as a gift to the late Edna Jackson and Wilson Howard. Howard? Yeah, not Neeson, Howard. Whoa.

And I was just like, Howard? Howard? Who's Howard? What is a Howard? And also, where did Neeson, this name that was such a big part of how I thought about myself, where did that even come from? Let me. Oh, hello. Hey. Hello. Can you hear me? You can hear me? Yeah. So I called up.

some of my aunts, Karen, Cheryl, and also my dad, and started asking questions. Did you ever learn anything about who your paternal grandfather was? I mean... So, they all knew that Edna Jackson was their dad's mom, and Wilson Howard was their dad's dad. Oh, yes. I mean, we saw him whenever he was in town. And my aunt Cheryl, she had met him. But my aunt Karen and my dad... Um...

They didn't really remember him at all. It's a very sparse memory. I don't know. Because like I said, we didn't spend much time with my father's people. Okay. And did you ever... And when I asked, do you know why we're called Neeson? Um...

No. Nobody knew? Mm-mm. Mm-mm. I have no idea. Really? Nothing? My Aunt Cheryl told me at one point, she actually asked her grandmother's sister the same question. If Wilson Howard is my dad's dad, why isn't our name Howard and not Neeson? And she said, that was adult business. ♪

There was sort of like kids' business, and then there was adult business, right? You know? We never really talked about it. And then I don't think my dad really knew either, because every time you talked to him about it, it was like, well, it's a situation. I'm like, what's a situation? Well, you don't need to know that, but you are a niece. I'm like, okay.

So nobody knew much about Wilson Howard, and they had no idea where the name Neeson came from. And the weird thing was, well, my dad and his sisters all feel very much like Neesons, are proud of the name. When it comes to where it actually came from... I haven't known this far in life, so... It's not going to necessarily change anything. They just didn't seem to care. I just never had a desire or an intense interest in it.

Really? Why not? I don't know. Maybe it was just like Neeson. Like, this is a variation of an Irish name. Like, that doesn't make sense in my context. And so I always knew that, like, for Black families, the whole idea of tracing your history through your name, it just doesn't take that long before you get to the generation where

where whatever name it is that your people were going by was imposed on them. So it's easy to look back and see all that mess and just decide not to step into it. But for me, I was like, this is my name. I write it down on everything. I wear it on my ring. It's how I think about myself. And I do care about where that name came from, about who it came from.

about all of the people who have carried this name through time all the way up to me. So... Like, I'm totally in my closet. Hi!

I found a genealogist to help me out. Her name is Nika Sewell-Smith, and the first thing she told me... One of the sort of hallmarks of genealogy is that you have to literally, like, go down a rabbit hole. This is not going to be easy. Genealogy keeps you in a perpetual state of being Alice, and particularly when you're focusing on African-American people, people who descended from the formerly enslaved. Because government documents or records of these family histories...

Sometimes they're messy, often incomplete, and a lot of times they were never even made at all. The archive and the historical record has never really truly been kind to us. But I was just like, look, let me tell you what I do know. And this is my grandfather, Clarence Neeson Sr., October 13th. I know that's the day he was born. And I gave her the whole rundown. So, like, what's your great-grandfather's name supposed to be? Wilson Howard. But the Neeson comes from... Dunno. Dunno.

And I've never, like, there's no first name. Like, no, the Neeson is basically a ghost. Okay, so... And right off the bat, Nika was like, look, you just got to start by figuring out who were all the people that were around back then. My mother, she was born in the city. Her parents. Aunts, uncles. And my father was born in St. Bernard, Paris. Get more information. Get all the little pieces. She got pregnant on her honeymoon. Mm-hmm.

I lived with my grandparents. And pretty quickly, the people, the relationships, the names. Everyone knew you by your mother's name. You know, my mother's name was Marjorie. It all starts to get pretty confusing. Y'all used to say that they had this lady that's our grandmother. And nobody really knew that much about that side of the family. But I don't think the lady really was. Okay. Try to keep, like, paper and stuff away from your phone so it doesn't pick it up on the mic.

So I went back to Nika and I was like, OK, the family tree, it has some holes. Less of a tree, more of a branch. That's OK. OK, got. Hey. But she was like, look, let's just start looking for documents. The census, birth, marriage and death certificate. Anything where a father's name could be captured. And so over the next seven months, Nika and I started checking in every week. The week felt really long.

We look over documents together. So go up to the top. This document spans across two different pages. And some days, there wasn't that much to report. You ever sound like little old ladies? That's what happens to old people. All they do is call each other and talk about their ailments. Talk about what the doctor said this week, right? Girl, you know he told me I had to get rid of my bunion. And then, one day...

So... Nika's looking over this old newspaper clipping, something about the draft and my grandpa being sent for a medical exam. Okay, so... And she zooms in on this and points to a little tiny J-R right next to my grandfather's name. It looks like your grandfather was a junior. But my dad is Clarence Jr. Based on what I'm seeing, it looks like your dad should be the third.

That's very strange. So all of a sudden, it looked like there could be not just a person named Neeson around, but a Clarence Neeson. Clarence Neeson, senior, senior. Correct.

So, you know, we started looking for a guy by that name around 1937, which is when Edna gave birth to my grandfather. And pretty quick, I have never seen this before, a possible candidate popped up. So for this, these are convict and conduct registers for the state of Texas. A form that was filled in by hand, dated 1942. They're noting that this man is 25 years of age, 5'6 1⁄2", 139 pounds. They note him as being Black.

Curse at the time, he's a Baptist who wears a size nine shoe. Okay. And robbery. That's what they claim was robbery. Let's see. Date of birth, 1917. Birthplace in Louisiana. He's a resident of New Orleans. Here's another clearance. He's old enough to be your great-grandfather.

out here robbing folks, allegedly. For the record, he pled not guilty, but he was convicted and he did do jail time. The plot is thickening. It is. Who is this Claire's niece? But, you know, now we had a guy and he had the right name. He was in the right place at the right time. And maybe he could possibly be my actual great grandfather. Or for some other reason, he's

is just the guy whose name my grandfather got. So I would research him and have him in his own kind of like tree so you have all his details together. That meant more research, more phone calls. I now had two possible family trees. Oh, stinking hilarious.

And then, Nika finds a key detail in the El Paso Times. This is Thursday, August 27th, 1942. Tucked into another article about this Clarence Neeson's robbery. It says, robbery charged New Orleans Negro. Like a specific brand of Negro? The New Orleans Negro. Right.

Like I'm watching a nature documentary. The article mentions that a few years earlier, this Clarence had married an Octavia Jackson in New Orleans in 1938. So we've got a marriage record, but let's, because families... So we go looking for the marriage license. See, this is pulling up a million and one things. Okay, see, here we go. Octavia, this is the right person. Ooh, she was 17. Look at him robbing the cradle. How old was he? He was 21. 21.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, no. Oh, no. Wilson Howard. What? On the marriage certificate listed as one of the witnesses is Wilson Howard. Okay. Wait a minute. Wait, the other great grandpa contender? Yeah. Whoa. He would have been 20 years old at the time. What? No. What? Okay. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wilson Howard witnesses.

Oh, no. They were friends? Oh, no. Oh, my freaking gosh. Okay. Were they friends?

We can't know for sure if they were friends or not, but on November 19th, 1938, it was a Saturday. These two men stood in the same room in New Orleans. Maybe it was a church. Maybe it was at City Hall. Probably they were both dressed to the nines, and Wilson Howard watched Clarence Neeson get married. And this would have been just a year after my grandfather was born. Like, I cannot. Grandma Edna, like, girl. Yeah.

Yikes. What is going on? I'm kind of paralyzed because I don't even know. Was it like a Wilson and Edna creeping on the lows? Oh my goodness. Or... It could be the other way around, right? I don't know.

Okay, so what are you thinking, Alex? Like, what's what? So at this point, there's a bunch of stuff going on in my head. I wanted to know more about this Clarence Neeson senior, senior guy who is maybe the reason my name is my name.

But I also was like, what's going on with Wilson Howard and Edna Jackson and Clarence Neeson Sr. Sr.? And is there a way for me to figure out who actually is my great grandfather? You see these wasps?

Be careful. And at that point, I decided we got to go to the place where it all happened. Do you think there are snakes in here? And so a few months later, Nika and I, plus producer Annie McEwen, found ourselves in Louisiana. Right.

Because first of all, there's only so much you can do online. A lot of things have not been digitized and we were going to have to go into the archives and dig them up. Snakes? I saw a few of them down there. And second of all, I just had this feeling that I wasn't going to truly understand these three people, that I wouldn't really get it unless I went to the place...

where they had lived their lives. This looks like a decently old cemetery. First stop, we knew that Clarence Sr. Sr. was buried in Texas, so we weren't able to visit him.

But we thought it only right while we were in the neighborhood. Oh, Wilson, Wilson, where art thou? To visit the resting place of the other man who might be my great grandpa, Wilson Howard. Where are you, Wilson? In a cemetery just southeast of New Orleans. Kind of a squared field. It's next to a baseball diamond. It's pretty big.

Pretty crowded. All of the crypts are above ground. And I am just walking kind of aisle by aisle. While we thought this was going to be a quick stop. Ooh, I'm stepping in mud. It was the first clue we had that things down here were going to be...

Oh, it is squishy. Way less straightforward than I thought. Because even though this is where his obituary said he was buried. Yeah, interment at Merrick Cemetery, August 10th, 1988. And... Here's a Frank Santiago. Williams, Nelson. Next to Liza Santiago Wright. Even though we combed through the entire graveyard. Where are you?

We just couldn't find him. In fact, there was supposed to be a whole bunch of Howards in that graveyard. So then we thought, wait, could the obituary be wrong?

Do y'all know where the Howards are? Then Nick asks these guys who were there mowing the grass. I don't think they're in here, Mama. They're not? And they tell her, that guy's not buried here. He's buried at a different cemetery down the road. He said, you came missing. And this tip...

sent us on this frenzied goose chase. He said to go to the red light and turn right. Oh, wait, no. He said there's a fork and you go to the right. Okay, I'll turn around. We gotta turn around. Into more and more graveyards. Howard. We looking for some Howard. Talk to that guy right there. Where we talk to more and more people. Oh, I mean, they got some Howard back there, but, um, Wilson. Yeah, Howard. I like that lady right there on that porch. I don't know. No Wilson Howard. Okay.

Y'all, the mosquitoes are mosquito-ing. And encountered more and more. I can feel them biting me. It's crazy. Local wildlife. I don't feel any. Oh, wow. There's a lizard. It's like lime green. Hey, friend.

After an entire day of grave hunting... Okay, so that... Yeah. Well, that was sort of anticlimactic. We never did find his grave. Ugh. Well... And as this fishing expedition for any sign of Wilson Howard or Clarence Neeson Sr. Sr. and any clues at all... Just anything. On which one was my great-grandfather or why my grandfather would have been named Neeson continued...

into the archives and libraries and courthouses of Louisiana. Here we go. We're trying to find two people who have been extremely elusive for us. Even though we were doing all the right things. What do you want to start with? Casting a wide net, looking for anything from property records to wills. What can we look at? Anything you want. It felt almost impossible.

Like we were looking for a couple of teeny tiny needles in a gigantic haystack. Mama always said when you start doing family history, carry pruning shears. We went through shelf after shelf of these massive old leather-bound books

filled with transaction receipts. - Neeson is the last name. - Okay, well we do it by vowels in here. - What is it? - Neeson. - Neeson. - And a lot of this stuff was organized in this bizarre system from the Civil War era that they're still using that is-- - That part of 75, you go into the NE section and that's-- - Very hard to follow. - A through Z and then A2 through Z2 and so on. - And you have to look line by line. - Okay. - What are you doing? - Oh, recording audio.

I'll have to approve that with my boss. Okay.

What last name are we looking for? But every so often, there were these little clues, little breadcrumbs about these two men and who they were to my grandfather. Succession of Wilson J. Howard, yes. Like, we eventually found Wilson Howard's succession, for instance. The succession is super important because that tells you who the heirs are. I see Geraldine, who is his wife, and then Darlene Howard and also Thelma Howard-Jones.

Hereby recognized as the only lawful heirs. On this document, Wilson's two daughters are mentioned, but not my grandfather. They did not include him. So what does that mean? And we were like, okay, maybe that means even though we have all these other documents where he is listed as my grandfather's dad, that Howard secretly knew he wasn't.

But also, there was just no way to know if his name was left off that page for some other reason, or if it was just a mistake, or a mishearing, or a clerical error. And sitting there in that archive... I just thought that there would be some kind of trail through the documents. I was realizing that we'd come all the way down here for some hard, simple facts. But honestly, I feel like we're still...

we've still wound up back in the speculating about a dead man's feelings. Maybe it was impossible in 2020-something to just swoop in, scan a document, and understand the world even just a few generations back, you know? Right. Right. But...

There was one person who had touched that world and moved through it. My dad has a cousin named Aurelia. Someone who is still alive, lives near New Orleans, and who I'd heard about from my aunt, Jahari Neeson. She knows all

the business. And they would have actually known Edna. Does that person go by like Rhea or Rhea? Yeah, Rhea. Rhea Jackson. Yeah, I know Rhea. Rhea could tell you more. Yeah, Rhea. She grew up in a parish and she stayed in a parish. And she's still in a parish till this day. That's how she knows a whole lot. If anyone could tell me

What was going on between Edna and Wilson and Clarence Sr. Sr., it was her. And I'd been calling her for months, leaving messages on her phone saying, I'm coming to New Orleans, I'd love to see you. Never heard back from her until...

How you doing? Hi. A few days into my trip. I finally meet you, huh? I know. I finally heard back from her. My name is Aurelia Amelia Jackson. I am Edna Jackson's niece. Edna had been Rhea's aunt. She'd actually known her. And so right away, even before we got settled for the interview, actually, I asked her the big question. Well, who was Clarence's niece?

my grandfather, who was his father? Which she answers immediately. Wilson Howard. So I'm like, all right, Wilson Howard. But then at that time, she started saying things about Howard being the real father, but his job took him away to sea a lot. So some other man stepped in to help raise my grandfather. That had to be somebody in the family. See, that'd be family people because I adopted a lot of kids too, so that's family people.

Okay. I guess what I'm trying to understand is why she wouldn't have given him the last name Howard. She probably was in a relationship with somebody and they just named the son after him. So it's possible then that Edna might have been like dating someone whose name was Neeson and...

I don't think so. So talking to Rhea, I started to realize that we were both speaking English, but we weren't really speaking the same language when it came to family. Okay, so for instance, like if you were to fall right now and I come and I pick you up and bring you by my house, I didn't put you there because I love you. She would use terms like family people. And I think her idea of what a relationship is was more expansive than mine. But you're going to remember what I did when I pick you up.

So that's the way it was with Clarence Neeson. So do you know that there was somebody named Neeson who did all those things? It had to be. Or else why would she give him the name? Thank you, ma'am. You know, nobody's going to just give you your name just like that. It's got to be somebody that really knows you and cares for you. When we take care of each other in the family, don't put it that way to you, because we're a family that takes care of each other.

Even though after talking to Ria, I was still kind of confused. My head hurts.

You ready? Yeah, we're ready. It felt like Howard and Clarence Sr. Sr., they were who Rhea called family people. Howard was at Clarence Sr. Sr.'s wedding. It sounded like maybe they'd both taken care of my grandfather at different points. And they both clearly had some kind of connection with the woman at the center of this story, Edna. We're at Ellen's Cemetery. And the gate's open. Who was buried at this grassy little courtyard cemetery surrounded by industrial buildings across the street from some houses. We're here to look

for my great-grandma Edna and I'm hoping we can find her. So much of this we just didn't have a whole lot to go on and we're like grasping at straws so much of the time it has felt like. Sincerely hope there's not poison ivy in here because that would friggin suck. You found? Yep. This is Edna? Yes Edna. Let's see.

Standing at Edna's grave...

I felt like it was clear that when Edna gave birth to my grandfather and named him, it wasn't a ploy or a cover-up or a random name lifted out of a baby book. It had meaning. It said something about the community of people she came from. Like, my name came out of this mix of family people, but that still leaves me at a crossroads, basically, where it's like, okay, if there's two paths, I can only walk one at a time. So which one is it? Wait, hold, what you got? Wait a minute.

And then, through the slow but eventual good grace of the state of Louisiana, I got my hands on a very precious document. Okay. Drum roll. We've got all the anticipation. My grandfather's birth certificate. We're hoping that this envelope is giving us something. If anything is going to tell us who his actual parents are... Okay, here we go. It's going to be this piece of paper. Okay. So, on the 13th of October this year, 1937, at Charity Hospital...

was born a male child named Clarence Neeson, colored. That's my grandpa. Illegitimate issue of Clarence Neeson and Edna Jackson. I knew it! I knew it! So it says Clarence Neeson. I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! This is what he was going to say. So Clarence Neeson, so Clarence Neeson, senior, senior, was your great-grandfather, and so you really, truly are a Neeson. Yeah, I mean, well...

So first, this is just a document. It's a piece of paper, like an obituary or a succession, like all the others. But it just felt like as soon as I'd gotten this affirmation, another question popped into my head. Who was the Neeson before Senior Senior? And who was the Neeson before that? Actually, who's the first Black person to get this European name? Who gave it to them? What did it mean to them? And why did they hang on to it?

After the break, Alex catches a break and stumbles on the person who is going to lead her like a straight path through the woods all the way back to the beginning of her name.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. Grab crumbs. Back from break. And then I'm like, oh, this is the best cookie. Yeah. Okay. Quick refresher. I've always felt very attached to my last name, Neeson. And despite the fact that there's sometimes scant documentation about Black people living in New Orleans between Emancipation and World War II, I

I had decided to try to figure out where my name actually came from. And after a detour into trying to figure out whether I was biologically related to Wilson Howard or Clarence Neeson Sr. Sr., I'd come across my grandfather's birth certificate, which said his father was, in fact, Clarence Sr. Sr. And it could be wrong, I guess, but it gave me the permission I needed to finally go hard at

the name Neeson. I'm ready. We in it. Let's do it. Next step was finding out where this name was from. So Reverend Clarence, Grandpa. And we thought the simple thing to do is to just follow the family tree as far back as it goes. His father. And then push from there. Is Clarence Neeson. So we traced a line from me to my dad to my grandpa to his dad. Ba-ba-ba!

Clarence Neeson Sr. Sr. Yes, let's go! And then we got his dad, Israel Neeson, and Israel Neeson's father is Levi Neeson. My great-great-great-grandfather, Levi. And then, after Levi, the Neeson Trail seems to dry up. Dang it! Which means, next,

Next, we need to find out as much as we can about who this Levi guy was. Okay. Over here. Right. And so Levi... We learn he was born, as best we can tell, in the 1840s, pre-Civil War, which means he could have been enslaved. But as we begin to gather documents on Levi, we start to notice misspellings. Lysam. We find his last name spelled Lysam Lysam.

Also, Neeson. Also... Hold on. Neesum. Neesum with an M. They're just all over the place with this name. I really got to say. So wait, I mean, is there a chance this could be a different person entirely? Yeah, because Leesum, it feels like...

so different from your name now. Right. But whenever we came across a misspelling, Nika would always say, number one, spelling doesn't count. We're looking for phonetics. Because these forms are often filled out by white clerks who may or may not have heard right or even cared to pay attention to how the person in front of them was pronouncing their name.

So, what do you do? You collect all these different names and then... We need them to be at the same place at the same time. Match up other life details. Got it. And so, now we knew we needed to widen our search to include a whole bunch of different spellings of Levi's last name. Let me see. And... Where did the... Wait. When we did... Wait, wait, wait, wait! Wait! What?!

Okay. Anika gets really, like, she's excited. She's pumped. This is the best news of the freaking week, dude. And I was like, why? Tell me, what is happening? Look at this Black man who was in the Civil War and we got, like,

She found documents that said that Levi had fought in the Civil War. Oh my gosh, okay, this opens up, I'm telling you. Oh, you don't even understand. Wait, why is she so excited? Why is this such a big deal? Because while documents specifically for Black people in this era of history were quite scarce, if there's one thing that the United States does well...

It documents its military obsessively. And so... Oh, this is great! We needed this break! After six months of exhaustive digging... Oh my gosh, I might actually do a cartwheel. And just basically picking up crumbs... Yes! All of a sudden...

There's a ton of information on this car. We learn that when he was 20 years old. Black hair, black eyes, black complexion, 5'7". He found his way to an enlistment office. Enlisted in New Orleans, November 4th, 1864. He joined the Union Army. 11 days later, he was mustered in. Look, bounty paid $100. Which is almost $2,000 today. So... He's balling. He is out someplace.

get his life. We learned he joined as a private in the 92nd United States Colored Troops Infantry. There were random details of things he did in the army. Repairing roads from Baton Rouge to Clinton. We learned he died in 1921 and... Emil Labatt, he was one of the early Black people that had a mortuary in New Orleans. We even learned the name of his mortician. Like, where else are we getting this information about Black people? We need...

This era, we're never getting it. We find out where he's buried. Veteran cemetery. Oh, we get guns. We find a picture of his headstone. Wow. And finally, we learn two super important facts about Levi. We learned his mom's name, Viney, which pushes us a little further down the Neeson family tree. And we learned the name of the parish where he was born.

East Feliciana Parish, which is a little over 100 miles northwest of New Orleans. It's like 8 a.m. The sun is like peeking through the forest that's lining the highway. It's foggy. Lots of crows everywhere and a lot of roadkill.

Finding the general area where Levi was born is such a big deal because if Levi was enslaved, he probably was born on his enslaver's land. It feels colder here, too. And one possible reason that all these Black people, including me, are named Neeson is because there were white people named Neeson who owned Black people. I mean, it's kind of beautiful, but it's also a little ominous.

So Nika goes into the archive. Let me just see if I can find any black or white Nison, Nisum, anything close in East Feliciana Parish. And she finds them. Nisums, with an M on the end. This was a white family with the last name Nisum. N-E-S-O-M. The same spelling that's in a lot of Levi's documents. And the patriarch was a man named Abraham. He was a veteran. He had served in the War of 1812.

And after the war, as part of an act that created West Florida, the government gave him a plot of land. The sun is up, so it should be starting to warm up. 600 acres just outside of Clinton, Louisiana. I actually feel the closer that we get to the coordinates that we're going to, the colder it gets and the darker it gets. He spent 20-some years on this land, raising a family, growing his business. And then in 1857, he died. All right, here we go.

And when he died, his entire estate was auctioned off. Succession of A. and L. Neeson. And in a small courthouse in Clinton, we found the papers for that auction. Light blue, delicate paper bound with like a little rope. The auctioneer had kept this incredibly detailed diary. Being known and remembered that on this 25th day of June in the year of our Lord, 1857, at the hour of 11 o'clock,

at the last place of residence of said deceased Abraham Neeson. Where he carefully wrote down... And this is where you get the bedsteads and tables and safes. Every single piece of property that was being auctioned. Looking glass. I...

Axes, wagon. Farm stuff. Blankets, quilts, curtains. All the stuff that you have in a house. Clothing. And also documented in this auctioneer's diary. Each one of these is a different person? Mm-hmm. Worth 33 enslaved people. Negro woman, Amy, age 60 years old. Margaret, Hillary, Spencer. We've got Sam. Sam.

And this is how we learned that the Nisams were slave owners. And this whole time we're reading, we're also scanning to see if we can find the names Viney and Levi. Because if we can, then we'll know that this is where my name comes from. This is...

Yeah, some viney. Okay. And we do find a woman named Viney. Nelson Neeson being the last and highest bidder. Bought by one of Abraham's sons. The said Negro woman, Viney, aged 59 years and her child girl, Sophia, aged 11 years. But this Viney was being sold with a daughter named Sophia. For the sum and price of $1,720. There's no sign of Levi. Ah.

So we were like, wait, it's possible that this is not the right viney and these are not the right nissims. I'm fast approaching delirium. Alex is almost nearing her end. She's getting delirious. I'm going to do close at 430. The archive was closing soon and we'd gone through the entire auction without finding Levi. But

But we had about 30 minutes, so we pulled these giant old leather-bound books off the shelves that were filled with hundreds of handwritten transaction records and just sort of manically flipped through, scanning the pages for the name reason. Which was a wild and nauseating experience because while a lot of these transactions were about land or animals or farm equipment, amongst all this stuff,

We would periodically stumble upon... 153 enslaved people. ...these giant lists of people. Little William, 11, 11 years old. Humphrey, Peggy. There's a two-year-old. There's an Alzi and an Ibby who were two. Age nine, age eight, age five, age 11.

Yeah, these are all kids up here. And even though we were short on time, it felt like we couldn't not read these people's names. And the list continues on the next page. Because we knew that for some of these cases, this was probably one of the only official records that these people had ever existed. William, 5. Anthony, 8. Little P, 8. Henry, 11. Cornelius, 3. This looks like Hamilton, 3.

And then the next page would be... Corn and fodder. Back to farm stuff. Seven head of horses and mules, land. After scanning as fast as we could through as many of these pages as we could, and just as they're about to kick us out of the archives... 1851, October 10th, 1851. We find a transaction dated six years earlier than the auction when Viney was sold. Abraham Neeson and William...

Franklin Neesom. Abraham the Patriarch is selling to his youngest son. Six certain Negroes of the names. Six enslaved people. Harriet.

Valued at $650. A woman named Harriet and her four kids. Tilda, a Negro girl aged about six. Valued at $250. And tacked onto the end of this group. Aged about four years. We find this small, barely legible, so tiny we almost missed it, very, very precious name. Levi. Levi. A Negro boy raised by hand. Uh.

And sickly. About seven years. About seven years. At $250. Which said... Okay, wait a minute. We learned here that Levi had probably had a wet nurse. That's what raised by hand means. Rather than being breastfed by his own mother, who probably had to work. We learned that he had been owned by Abraham. And we learned that this is why he wasn't in the auction papers six years later with his mom and his sister.

A negro boy raised by hand. Because when he was a sick little boy, he was sold away from her. Finding Levi here was like finding the last link in the Neeson chain. Interesting to have that ring right next to this sail here. Yeah. Yeah. This is where my name comes from, from Abraham Neeson, from this family. Yeah. Yeah.

Growing up, one of the big reasons why my last name was so important to me was because even though we had moved around so much, I felt like the name Neeson anchored me to a real place, somewhere where my family was from, where I was from. It's from like a gravel road.

And that place had always been New Orleans. But now that I learned where this name had really come from, and where we had really come from, down to the actual coordinates that we found in Abraham's government land grant, I had to go there. We should be pulling up. And after driving about two hours northwest of New Orleans, we arrive at this meadow, sort of on the edge of the forest.

and park in front of this short bit of fence and this massive real estate sign. Becky and Becky. There's two Beckys. We're two smiling white ladies, both named Becky. We're selling this meadow in plots of land. And it's going to be a housing development eventually. Oh, wow. Hi, Beck. I know. But for now, if you hop the ditch, step around the fence, and kind of climb through the weeds, the field just opens up in front of you.

It was filled with tall grasses, wild flowers. You could imagine cows or sheep grazing peacefully on it under this big blue sky. Yeah, I mean, it was beautiful. This was the land where Levi was born. And it was here that as a little boy, he was sick and was sold away from his mother. And now here I was, his great-great-great-granddaughter.

And what I wanted to do was think of something important to say, something worthy of these people. But instead, I just wandered around. Feeling extremely overwhelmed. I don't even know what to say. And not able to articulate why. An orange butterfly just passed and just landed near me. I just feel uneasy here. And the longer I was there, the more and more aware I became...

of the ring on my finger. I'm walking around with this name on my hand, on every paper I sign, on every credit card I have, and the name part of it represents a horror. And this is where it starts. Like, especially being on that land, the name, it does start to feel gross. Should we have expectations of feeling whole when we go back to these

these forced work spaces. Were you seeking wholeness by going to Abraham's land-grant spot plantation? Or was it just to see what happened? I don't think I've thought about wholeness because I haven't, I feel very overwhelmed. And like, I can't, like, it's hard to process everything this whole week right away. So I try to think like, how do I feel? A lot of the times the answer is, I don't know.

So I don't, and I feel a lot of pressure to have a feeling, you know. But a lot of the time the answer is just like, it's just soup in my head. My brain feels like it's reaching its CPU capacity. All of the fans are spinning. It's getting hot. It's hot, like you can't put it on your leg, keep it on your lap anymore. My brain is struggling. It's hot.

How do you move on from this land and from Abraham? How do you keep being a Nisan after you know where the name came from? When Levi left this land, when Viney left this land, what did they do? Well, for Levi, after he sold as a seven-year-old sickly boy, the next time we find evidence on paper that he ever existed is when he pops up in New Orleans as a 20-year-old runaway enlisting in the Union Army.

And as for Viney, four years after she was sold with her daughter Sophia to Abraham's son, the Civil War begins. There's no trace of Sophia, but as we move forward in time from there, on the 1870 and 1880 censuses, you can see a couple of Vineys living in East Feliciana Parish. There's a Viney Rogers, there's a Viney Doherty, and there's also a Melvina Banks, who sometimes goes by Viney.

And Nika thinks that any one of these women, maybe even more than one of them, could be our Viney. These people are walking into their lives choosing how they want to be referred to. So Viney could have used one last name for a while and then just changed her mind. Yeah! Anyway, maybe the bigger clue...

That one of these is our viney. Going through all of the enslaved people one by one. Is that that list of people who were sold on the same day she was? Some of those people are in the same community as these vineys that I found.

Offer for sale, Negro woman, Amy, age 60 years old. Like, one of these Vineys has a neighbor named Amy who's the right age to be the same one from the auction. And I'm completely positive that it's her because her name is listed as Amy Neeson. There's also a Susan and a Louisa and a Millie living nearby. And all three of these people were sold in the same auction that Viney was. It's still the same community of people. And it's in this community that Viney made a home...

Hmm.

Okay, so this is the thing that I want to show you. Okay. So if you just click this link, it's an image. Okay, I see it. Looks like an index card, kind of. Yeah. This is from a collection of military documents that we found online.

If he died in the war,

then let's apply for his pension. And the kind of small but incredible thing here is that since she's been free, there's been no documentation that Viney's ever used the name Nisam. But here in this form, it says name of dependent mother, Nisam Viney. She uses this old name, the name of her enslaver. Why would she do that? Oh, that's a great question. So one of the things that we see with enslaved people is

is the name that their enslavers had is often an identifier for their relatives that were sold away from them or separated from them to find them. This is historian Dinah Ramey Berry, and I called her up because this is the kind of question she thinks about every single day. People ask, "Well, why did people keep their quote-unquote slave name?" You know, you hear that in contemporary conversations. But often enslaved people, until they could reconnect with their biological family or the family that had become a biological family for them,

Sometimes they chose to keep that name. Or in Viney's case, use the name. As a marker in space. And sometimes the only way they could trace after being sold or separated, you know, across county lines, across state lines, was a name. One name. So Viney puts down this name, the last name she ever knew her son to have. And she files this application and she waits for a reply from the government.

But there wasn't a certificate granted. Her application was declined because it had already been granted to someone else, to Levi, because he wasn't dead. Whoa. And here's what we could find out about him. He's kept the name Nisam. He's now a man in his 40s living in a cabin on a plantation just outside New Orleans in St. Bernard Parish, where he rents an acre of land and plants vegetables.

He's got some health problems, chronic rheumatism, complications from a really bad bout of smallpox. And about two or three days a week, when he can, he works for an Italian family on their vegetable farm. We also know that living in the cabin with him was his wife, a woman named Celia Hall. We know that they ended up ultimately having six kids named Levi, Mamie, Elizabeth, my great-grandfather Israel, Harry, and John, all nieces.

And we can't know because, of course, there are no documents on this, but it's possible, and I hope, that because Levi kept the name Nisam and Viney used the name Nisam, that they were able to find each other. Wow. I hope they traveled the hundred and some miles that separated them. I hope that Viney got to visit Levi's cabin. Maybe they went outside in the late summer sun and picked vegetables out of his garden, tomatoes or cucumbers or zucchini, and made dinner together.

And most of all, I hope that at the age of 97, Viney finally got to meet her grandkids.

It's an anchor. Like, the name has anchored your family. Even if there's been some detours along the way, it still connects you to family. Again, Dinah Raimi Berry. And the quest for family genealogy, as you have even experienced yourself, that's exactly what enslaved people were doing live during slavery and in the immediate aftermath and trying to connect with family. You know, your name has been important to multiple generations of your relatives. ♪

Whoa, where are we? One last stop. One last cemetery. This one for veterans. The grass is green and cut and trim. There's mud on my shoes. No mud here. I've come to say goodbye to Levi. 12-7-9-6 and 12-7-9-7. Levi Leesam. Just a very simple headstone. Very clean. USCT, United States Colored Troops.

Here he is. He's right underneath a big tree. Even though he'd been lying here all along, to find him, I had to wade through the horror of one of the worst things that has ever happened in our history. And I keep thinking about to have yesterday held a piece of paper that documented his sale as a 7-year-old boy, referred to him as sickly, and then today to make it here yesterday.

enslaved and today free. And through that whole journey, he held on to our name, carrying it from enslavement to freedom and onwards. And I keep thinking about the moment that I asked my dad why he didn't seem as hung up on the question of are we supposed to be Nisans? And if we are, where did it come from? And if we're not, then who are we supposed to be? Then whose name are we supposed to be carrying with us?

into the future. And my dad's attitude about it was, hey, this name, this is what I got. Here's what it is now. And I'm going to make sure that I honor, develop, and move the ball with it. Maybe similar to dad, Levi thought, you know, I'm right here. Here's my starting point. I'm moving forward.

Looking back, I found a lot of people, my people, holding on to this name like a bright line through history. Each of us for a different reason as it shifted and changed, connecting us all together. Proof that we were here, that we still are here. All of us, looking forwards. You still wearing that ring? Definitely. Never taking this thing off.

This episode was reported by Alex Neeson with editorial and research support from the patient yet excitable Nika Sewell-Smith. It was produced by Annie McEwen and Andrew Vinales with dialogue mix from Arianne Wack.

Most of the music we used in this episode came from an amazing group of musicians we gathered here in the WNYC studios. Paul Brandenburg on trumpet, Justin Flynn on sax, Mark Miller on trombone, Kenny Bentley on the tuba, and Jason Isaacs on the drums, all recorded by Irene Trudell.

Special thanks. Alex, you want to take those family thanks? Yeah. Family thanks? None of this story could have been possible without help from my aunts, Cheryl Neeson Isadore, Karen Neeson Dykes, Jahari Neeson, Kian Neeson, my uncles, Kevin Neeson and Anthony Neeson, who actually recently passed away, my mom, Olivia Neeson, my grandfather, the late Clarence Neeson Sr.,

or so we thought. And of course, my dad, the person who started this all, Clarence Neeson Jr., or so we thought. And I also want to thank, I guess she's my cousin, Aurelia Amelia Jackson, also known as Rhea. Thanks also to Russell Gragg, Victor Yvelles, Asher Griffith, Sabrina Thomas, Nancy Richard, Katie Neeson, Amanda Hayden, Gabriel Lee, and Devon Schwartz.

And before we let you go, we wanted to tell you about a show that exists in the same orbit or realm of the story you just heard. It's from our colleagues at WNYC Studios over at the show La Brega, a show about the Puerto Rican experience. They've just released a whole second season. Each episode is about a different song from the island. I loved one that's about this unlikely salsa hit about a father rejecting his own kid, El Gran Verón.

En la sala de un hospital, a las 9 y 43, nació Simón.

That episode ends up becoming this really tear-jerkery story about a father and daughter. But the story that feels like it is truly in conversation with the one you just heard is called The Moon's Distance. And while in our story you heard Alex clawing into the past to discover that distance can create a closeness that we usually assume can't be had over space and time, this episode claws its way into the future.

to imagine a kind of connection between a castaway of sorts and their homeland. If that sounds a little confusing, let me just play a brief excerpt from the episode, The Tippy Top, where host Alana Casanova Burgess sets up the mischievous thing that they decide to do. There's a poem, Boricua en la Luna, that became a song.

It was written by Juan Antonio Correjer from Ciales, like my mother, and it was put to music and sung for the first time by Roy Brown. It's a song about not being in Puerto Rico, as so many Puerto Rican anthems are.

But the message isn't only about yearning. It's about defiance, about holding on to your Puerto Rican-ness wherever you are. It's the ultimate diaspora song, and it gets me every time. The narrator is born in New York, of parents who left the island and who dreamed of one day returning. And it's a dream he shares as well. There's a line. He lives with the hope that one day he can reclaim what he has lost.

"Un Puerto Rico de ensueño," "A Puerto Rico of dreams." And then, the most famous lines, the last two: "Yo sería borincano, aunque naciera en la luna." "I would be Puerto Rican even if I were born on the moon."

That line, it says so much about what it means to be from this place and to hold on to that no matter what. Nobody can take it away from us. It's such a profound and relatable feeling. We wanted to push it as far as it could go.

And so, for this episode, we asked the renowned Puerto Rican writer Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón to imagine a new universe for Boricua en la Luna. The story he created is as rich and surprising as the song and poem at its heart, and I'm so excited to share it with you. And so, this is The Moon's Distance.

Hi, Kelvin. This is Nanette. It is such a great episode. I love that they thought to do this and that they did it and executed it so well. So go check out La Brega, The Moon's Distance, or any of all the other episodes they have there. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next time. Catch you soon. Bye.

Hi, I'm Tori Neeson, and I'm calling from Augusta, Maine. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick,

With help from Andrew Vinales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. ♪

Hi, my name is Teresa. I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Seymans Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Thank you.