HI Rick,
I just saw your posting at Afrigeneas regarding your ancestors fleeing slavery in Virginia and settling in St. Catharines. You were apparently told that your ancestors were among the groups that Harriet Tubman brought north. I am a Tubman biographer and have done extensive (14 years) research on Tubman. I have documented most of her redscue missions, as well as the people she brought north - approximately 70 people, not 300, in about 13 trips, not 19, during the 1850s. Tubman broght away family and friends from Maryland and southern Delaware exclusively. She was interviewed numerous times regarding her rescues, and revealed that she only went back and forth to Maryland and escaped through a set of routes weaving through Dorchester and Caroline Counties in Maryland, through Delaware and then into Pennsylvania and New York to Canada. She never went to Virginia, or Ohio, etc. If your relatives had moved to the Eastern Shore of Maryland prior to 1849, when Tubamn fled her self, then there could be a chance that they fled with Tubman, but otherwise it is unlikely.

The wonderful thing is that your family did escape and you must discover their own story of resistance, flight and survival. The folks at the BME Church in St. Catharines do not have complete research and therefore are seemingly unaware of the extensive work done by numerous scholars in the US and Canada regarding the hundreds of freedom seekers who settled in St. Catharines, and those who fled with Tubman specifically. Tubman brought a fraction of the many who settled in or near that city. The rest came on their own. Their stories need to be told in addition to Tubman's story, in spite of the fact that she is notably the most famous, but not the only, conductor.

Your family, no doubt, has a fabulous story to tell on its own with or without Harriet Tubman!! If you do have evidence that your ancestors were on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the 1840s, I would love to hear about it! Did any of them return to the South after the Civil War?

Best regards,
Kate C. Larson
www.harriettubmanbiography.com
kcliflar@aol.com
kate.larson@simmons.edu