From Malden to Hudson Valley: Two strangers discover shared family legacy and hidden history of enslavement in New York

By Kami Nguyen / Neighborhood View

Eleanor Mire, a lifelong Malden resident, wanted to learn about her family’s past after she watched the Ken Burns documentary series, The Civil War.

“I always point to that because there was so much he put into that that I absolutely didn’t know, and I thought I knew about the Civil War,” Mire said. “That pushed me to start looking into my family and how they related to the Civil War, and that opened the floodgates.”

Mire’s ancestors are part of a myriad of individual family histories that have shaped the past, present, and future of the United States. Some stories are waiting to be told, truths yet to be discovered.

In her new book, A Hudson Valley Reckoning, Debra Bruno reckons with her family history of slaveholding and the realities of slavery in northern states.

At the center of this story are Mire’s ancestors, who were enslaved in the 1800s by Bruno’s ancestors in upstate New York.

Mire’s great-grandparents on another side of her family moved to Malden in 1906 from Boston. They initially came to Massachusetts from Williamsburg, Virginia in 1826 after they were freed from Southern slavery by General Benjamin Butler, who himself was from Lowell.

Mire and Bruno met in 2020 while researching their family histories. The serendipity of how they found each other led to a close friendship ever since.

Going through some of the research that her cousin had already done pointed her to the area of Coxsackie in Hudson Valley, Mire recalled.  She heard that someone was looking for information about enslavement in the Hudson Valley and connected with them through a Facebook page called “I’ve Traced My Enslaved Ancestors and Their Owners.”

As fate would have it, that person turned out to be Bruno.

The two met in person in Washington, D.C. where Bruno lives.

“When we met it was like my long-lost sister. I mean, we just immediately clicked,” Mire said.

In the genealogical world, people who meet don’t often keep in touch with one another, but Mire and Bruno, both history lovers, enjoyed researching together.

“We had what we call rabbit holes. We’d find some bit of information and knowing that we really probably wouldn’t find anything substantive, we went looking anyway. The interest and the chase was there, trying to find out,” Mire said.

They found out through census records that Mire is a descendant of Mary Vanderzee, the woman in the photograph on the book’s cover.

Mary was born into slavery or indenture in 1802 and was owned by people on Bruno’s family tree. From the ages of 13 to 19, she had four children, who were described as being mixed-race. One of them was Mire’s great-great-grandfather, Thomas Venderzee, who was born in 1815.

In 1826, all slaves in New York were emancipated gradually through indentured servitude. However, Mary’s father had purchased his freedom seven years earlier in 1819. Miro and Bruno suspect he did so to help Mary secure her freedom from the household she worked for.

In her adult life, she married and had more children.

Even with modern databases such as Ancestry DNA, Mire acknowledged that in discovering history, there are still some things they will never know.

“It said that she (Mary) had 11 children and we only know about five of them. And all I could think of was what happened to all those children?” she wondered. “That’s something that you go looking for and you probably will never find it. But that’s one of those things that brings you right back down to the feeling: what happened?”

The story that did come together from those fragmented pieces of history deeply touched Mire and brought her closer to her family. Finding out this information was a process she described as being “remarkable”, and “sometimes overwhelming”.

“It makes you feel all of a sudden 1800 isn’t that long ago,” she said. “All of a sudden, it’s much closer. The time is much closer, the people much closer, because you’re really seeing them and seeing their lives.”

Mire also spoke about issues she sees in the way that history is taught in schools—concerned with memorizing dates and learning about the wealthy and powerful. She finds it more engaging and meaningful to explore the lives of real, everyday people, no matter how painful their stories are.

“To just say they were slaves and then they were free doesn’t get to the heart of things like babies being sold and waking up and not knowing where you’re living,” she said.

“You can’t just go on the good stories, the feel-good stories because I think in a sense, you’re denying them a certain amount of humanity by denying that they were sad. Things happened that hurt, but they lived through it and they had to persevere through it,” Mire said.

A Hudson Valley Reckoning explores the often-overlooked history of slavery in New York, perpetuated by Dutch settlers since the state was called New Amsterdam. Mire provides the book’s afterword, having declined Bruno’s invitation to write the entirety of it together.

Warm, funny, and straightforward, Mire admitted she would not be a good co-writer. “I’m very unreliable. To me, it would be like a year of homework, and I was never good at homework.”

However, the story’s epilogue came to her organically.

“I was able to sit down and do it. I don’t know how and I don’t know where the words came from, but since I had the feeling for the family and the subject matter, the words came,” she added.

She hopes that the book inspires readers to look into their personal family histories, just as The Civil War did for her.

“I think it’s important, not just for even enslavement, but for all groups of people to know how they got here, what the struggles of the people in the family [were].”