Madam Walker and The Doctors Dumas of Natchez

Madam Walker's November 8, 1916 letter to Atty. F. B. Ransom describes her visit with the Doctors Dumas in Natchez, MS (www.aleliabundles.com)

Combine clues in a faded letter from November 1916 with the algorithms of Facebook and the distance across the decades evaporates.

 Finding descendants and relatives of people who knew my great-great-grandmother, Madam C. J. Walker, and her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, thirty years ago when I began researching On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker often was a hit or miss proposition.

But even then–long before we had all the Internet tools we now take for granted–I had the sense that the ancestors were leading me to the interviews I did in the homes of  surviving Harlem Renaissance icons Alberta Hunter, Dorothy West, Bruce Nugent and Geraldyn Dismond (later known as Jet’s society columnist, Gerri Major) and artist Romare Bearden, whose mother, Bessye Bearden, had been a close friend of A’Lelia Walker’s.  (more…)