Grave Updates
By 
It so happened that the day I was writing the grave post for Mount Zion Cemetery and Female Union Band Cemetery, the historically Black cemeteries in DC, there was a horrific story about someone setting the toys people had left around the gravestone of a small girl on fire. Really, what the hell is wrong with people sometimes?
Anyway, there happens to be good news around this grave.
But now, Nannie may have been identified. On Tuesday, a journal published a piece that offers a deeply researched theory about who Nannie was and the life she led.
If that theory is correct, her name was Francis Tinny. She was Black, and she was free at the time of her death. She had two older sisters and a large extended family in the D.C. region that included relatives who knew what it meant to live as enslaved people.
Her father, William, was born into slavery, and her grandmother Matilda had at least once tried to escape from a prominent man who enslaved her, a clerk in the U.S. House of Representatives. A runaway notice in 1814 about her reads: “Matilda is five feet five inches high; about twenty years of age; rather spare and likely. Had on when committed, a habit of domestic cotton, shoes and stockings, and brought with her a band box, with a few articles of clothing. Matilda is pregnant, and far advanced. Her owner is requested to release her from prison, or she will be sold agreeably to law.”
That notice was just one piece of information that Mark Auslander, a historical anthropologist who grew up in the District, and Lisa Fager, executive director of the Black Georgetown Foundation, found during the thousands of hours they spent researching Nannie’s identity.
“We got kind of obsessed with it,” Auslander told me recently. The research took them deep into library archives and historical documents. It led them to consider more than 700 girls who could have been Nannie, before eliminating each possibility one by one. “It just seemed to us we all owed it to her to help with the identification process, and that’s what kept us going.”
Auslander compared Nannie’s grave to the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery: “I think one of the reasons people have come to love her is that she represents not only one individual but so many individuals, so many children.”
Really, this is very impressive work. Thought you all might be interested given what’s been going on at that grave site since I visited.