Little did I know that was the last time I’d hear my grandmother wish me happy birthday. She called me every year to sing to me. Hearing this voice message instantly brings me joy and reminds me of my grandmother’s loving spirit that I admire and strive to embody.
I was 23-years-old in January 2022 when I lost both of my grandparents within six days of each other. My grandfather transitioned on January 2, 2022 and my grandmother, affectionately known as “Grammy,” passed on January 8. It was eerie how they transitioned so close together, both dying from “natural causes.”
I believe my grandfather died from natural causes, but I think it was grief that caused my Grammy to transition six days after her husband of more than 60 years.
Similarly, it was grief that influenced me to transition into who I am today. The death of my grandparents changed my life tremendously. Their deaths shifted how I maneuver the world and my perspective on legacy and family history. After my grandparents transitioned, I questioned myself a lot: Why wasn’t I more inquisitive? Why didn’t I ask more questions about our family history while they were still living? How can I find and preserve the genealogical information, histories, and traditions of my family that has now been buried with my grandparents?
I spent most of my childhood summers with my grandparents while my parents worked, so I had plenty of time to ask questions. My grandparents were my informal early child care and education providers. Grammy would tell me stories about her childhood as a southern belle living in Tennessee and about her mother “Madea,” my great grandmother, who transitioned two years before I was born. Grammy would tell the same stories over and over again. The stories I remember vividly are: her memories of our family working on cotton fields, Madea’s legs being amputated mistakenly by incompetent doctors, and Grammy waking up in a delivery room to news that the twins she carried full term and delivered were “still birth” without sight or touch of the baby’s bodies. Till the day she died, she believed those babies were stolen from her and possibly sold. She suspected the twins were alive and out in the world somewhere, but never investigated further. (She is not the only Black mother who had such an experience, suspecting an adoption scheme, as an investigation by the Associated Press revealed a few years ago).
All these memories represented the several ways African Americans faced racism, anti-Blackness, and health inequity in the 20th century. This isn’t ancient history, this is within the two generations of my own life.
In my youth, I didn’t recognize the importance of these stories and preserving oral histories. At the time, the repetitiveness of these stories admittedly annoyed me as a pre-teen, but now I wish I listened and asked more questions to dig deeper into the details. I believe I didn’t ask questions because I thought my grandparents were immortal. Everything had a way of being more everlasting when I was young. Their deaths were the first in my immediate family. So what seemed distant and not applicable to me, a 23 year old with so much ahead of me, death quickly came to the forefront of my mind, a reminder of our impermanence in the physical form.
Shaken by two sudden losses, thinking of my own limited timeline, I became determined to help preserve the legacy of my grandparents – and other impactful caregivers and teachers. I was inspired to learn more about archives and creating them. In February 2022 I received news that I was selected as a Robert F. Smith Digitization summer intern with the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. Even more, the following month I picked up a professional camera, and without much more than a few university film electives and free courses at Black Girl Film School, I created my first film series titled The Good Land. In this series, I conducted video interviews of Black community leaders in my hometown Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Milwaukee gets a bad rep for being one of the most segregated cities in the United States and one of the worst cities for Black folks to live. But I wanted to reshape the narrative of Black Milwaukee through film by preserving the stories of Black Milwaukeeans working to create a better city. When I picked up the camera to shoot the film, I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew it was exactly where I was meant to be.
By June, I moved to Washington, D.C. for the summer to work as a Digitization intern at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. I learned how to preserve archives by using cameras to convert physical archives to digital formats. I had the opportunity to see evidence of leadership and changemaking as I digitized the physical archives of Black-led institutions including: Saint Paul’s College, a historical Black college in Virginia that closed its doors in 2013, and Scurlock Studios, a well-known African American photography studio in Washington, D.C. that captured portraits of pioneers such as W.E.B. DuBois and Madam C.J. Walker in the early and mid-1900s.
I also learned how to conduct genealogy and family history research using national archival records like census documents, and marriage and death certificates. I was excited to use genealogy as a tool to discover my family’s history in a new way. I went down the rabbit hole of the Jones’ family history going as far back as the 1800s. I knew my grandparents were from Tennessee, but I was able to find the exact location they grew up, in the rural south, and their involvement in the historic Great Migration as an African American family that moved from Tennessee to Milwaukee during the 1900s. I also learned about their racial classifications as “Mulatto” and their highest level of educational attainment being 4th grade. Learning this information, seeing it in official documents, made me reflect on how I defied the odds, unimaginable of my ancestors as a Black woman with a master’s degree living her best life as a multimedia storyteller.
After completing the internship in August, I returned home to Milwaukee to start editing my film and continue diving deeper into my family’s history. As a filmmaker, I realized I was continuing the work of preserving and digitizing archives. I was preserving stories of Black Milwaukeeans by capturing their faces and voices.
In 2023, I released three episodes of my documentary series The Good Land. Each episode featured an interview of a Black Milwaukeean sharing the work they do as artists, healers, and naturalists to bring positive change in the city. The first episode titled Muneer Bahauddeen: Vision that shared the story of an artist using vision to generate peace in Milwaukee received praise and accolades with film festival screenings across the U.S. in cities such as Brooklyn, New York City, and Chicago.
Simultaneously, my mother and her siblings came to a decision to sell my grandparent’s house as is. Before selling, I had a chance to go through the house to take anything inside I wanted to keep. Upon returning to the same home, I spent so much of my childhood in, I saw the house with fresh eyes and through the restored eyes of an archivist. I found photographs of ancestors such as my great-grandparents Mariah and Richard Maclin. I was able to put a face to the census records I found during my genealogical research. I also found a family Bible with written genealogical records, Black history books, and Jet magazines. I designated myself the family archivist – and took all these found items to keep and preserve for generations to come.
Fast forwarding to the present day, I am screening my second and most recent film Something in the Water that documents Black Milwaukeeans’ experiences with lead poisoning. I am also working on my third film 13 to None that will follow the stories of food insecurity in Milwaukee’s 13 food deserts, which is set to start filming this spring.
Even though my focus has been on preserving stories – the past and present histories of Black Milwaukeeans through film, I thankfully had the chance to turn the lens on myself to discover and preserve the history of my family. At the same, I encourage and offer services for other Black people to preserve their family history through my production company Naesthetycs, which is my first name, Nateya, combined with the word aesthetics.
There’s a saying I’ve heard that goes along the lines of, “when people in your life transition, they transition to guide you.” Although my grandparents are no longer here physically, I feel their ancestral guidance, wisdom, and power over my life daily through their spiritual presence. Their transition into the afterlife helped me transition, growing and evolving into the person I am today. And there is resistance in knowing my value and the value of my family’s legacy in this way.
Now, I share my knowledge and gifts of preserving Black stories with the world so that my family’s stories and the stories of other Black families will never be lost.