Bringing Local History to Life

During the March 2015 Women’s History month celebration at Mars Hill University, Kelly Navies presented a family history that began with her great-great-grandmother Betty Gudger Stevens, who was born a slave in Buncombe County.

This intriguing, interesting, and fascinating presentation confirmed the power of Oral History in bringing the past to life.

Betty Gudger-Stevens was born in Leicester, NC, to Ann Penland and Sam Gudger. Her parents were enslaved on two separate farms, one owned by the Penlands, the other by the Gudgers. With the blessing of her parents, Betty married Sam Stevens, a free black man. She was a wonderful cook, a devoted mother, a skilled midwife, and she would often walk as much as twelve miles to church.

Betty lived to be over 100 years of age: family members state she was between 102 and 106 years old at her death. No one knows for sure because of the lack of birth records for enslaved peoples in Buncombe County.

Kelly found her great-great grandmother’s gravesite at the Episcopal Church Cemetery in Leicester. There was also an extensive obituary written in the Asheville Citizen in 1958, an unusual occurrence for a black woman in that era.

Betty Gudger-Stevens’s daughter, Annie Whiteside, was Kelly’s great-grandmother; she had seven daughters, one of whom was Kelly’s grandmother, Connie Alberta Whiteside. Annie Whiteside was said to be a deeply spiritual and powerful woman who could literally float on air.

Kelly first became interested in Oral History when her seventh-grade English teacher asked students to interview an elder and write about their history. Throughout the years this interest remained with her and became a catalyst for her to write a term paper about her great-great-grandmother.

Using photos, documents, and newspaper articles, she was able to weave an intriguing story about her family heritage that gives a new perspective on the life of African women in Buncombe County. She also interviewed family members who remembered her great-great-grandmother, an experience that compelled her to continue her research and oral presentations.

As is often the case in historical and genealogical research, especially among ancestors who did not fit the profile of “privileged” classes, there was much that Kelly was not able to learn about her ancestor.

“One thing this research brought home is the painful fact that the internal lives of black women of the 19th, century (many of whom were illiterate), remains a mystery. By choosing oral history as the methodology for this family history project, I became a living embodiment of African American women’s literature. All at once, you become the author, character, and the person who can educate an audience with historical and literary narratives,” concluded Kelly.

Kelly E. Navies was born in Detroit, Michigan, with deep family ties to Buncombe County. She attended graduate school at UNC Chapel Hill, where she enrolled in the Southern Oral History Program. She was assisted in her research by her cousin Geraldine Ray, also a family historian.

Kelly now works as a librarian and oral historian in Special Collections at the Washington, DC Public Library. She plans to return to Buncombe County and expand on her presentation in the future.