(Credit: UNC Chapel Hill Library) Photo by UNC Chapel Hill Library *** Article content The only image of Solomon Northup is from his autobiography, 12 Years A Slave, originally published in 1853. This is a story of their surprising discoveries and the mysteries that remain. What drove Bass to abandon his family in Canada? What became of Northup after he was freed? And where are they buried? Meanwhile, amateur sleuths have been combing through courthouse archives, genealogy websites, newspaper clippings, burial registries, and census records - often having to narrow their eyes to decipher hard-to-read fonts or cursive writing - in an effort to answer lingering questions. “It hits you right in the heart - to look at them, to feel them, to hug them and talk to them,” says Carol Alkerton, Bass’s great-great-great granddaughter from Prescott, Ont., recalling the first time she met Northup’s descendants. (Credit: Handout) Photo by (Credit: Handout)įrom these sobering visits, lasting friendships have formed.

Article content Vera Jackson-Williams, founder of the Solomon Northup Foundation, stands outside the Avoyelles Parish courthouse in Marksville, Louisiana. “You go back into the fields where they actually would’ve been taking care of the crops … I felt their spirit still there,” says Vera Jackson Williams, Northup’s great-great-great granddaughter in Maryland and founder of the Solomon Northup Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to preserving his legacy. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Just outside the town of Bunkie, there’s a dirt road that takes visitors past a derelict church and across a weather-worn wooden bridge to the edge of a sugarcane field - the former site of a plantation once owned by Edwin Epps, a savage man who, according to Northup’s autobiography, whipped his slaves just to hear them “screech and scream.” They’ve made pilgrimages to Northup’s hometown in New York state, Bass’s homestead in rural Ontario, and to the place where Northup spent the bulk of his time in slavery - here in central Louisiana’s Avoyelles Parish, a region steeped in French-colonial history and surrounded by sweeping farmland, meandering bayous and moss-hanging shade trees. Outside the glare of the Hollywood spotlight, a loose network of history buffs and descendants of Northup and Bass have heeded that call. “If that starts a conversation, wonderful,” he said. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receiptīy that he meant he hoped the movie, which won the Academy Award for best picture, would inspire researchers to keep digging for new information.

Solomon northup descendants