Focusing in further on the Cesar family history

Editor’s note: This guest commentary came into The Lakeville Journal from Katherine Overton following the publication of a story by Senior Reporter Patrick Sullivan on the Cesar family history. It is correcting a couple of small points, and offering further information. We appreciate her reading the paper so carefully and sharing her thoughts with our readers, as follows:

Dear Mr. Sullivan,

 I would like to personally thank you on behalf of myself and the descendants of the Cesar family for your recent article about our family’s contributions to the Salisbury/Sharon community during the early 19th and 20th centuries that was published on June 3, 2021. It is a huge honor to have our family narrative highlighted by a newspaper which has played such a large role in providing the community with facts and ideas that are important to the intellectual and social commentary that we are accustomed to reading in this publication for as far back as when my early Cesar family members were living here. I believe that featuring our history continues to uphold those early standards.

 It has truly been a blessing and a privilege to have worked with the gentleman scholars at the Salisbury School and their dedicated history teacher Mr. Rhonan Mokriski, as they began the challenge of discovering previously hidden histories of African American families who were a part of our local communities, and whom they are focused on researching and commemorating. And, especially that they chose to focus on our Cesar family story which they created a documentary about:  “Coloring Our Past” on YouTube.

 Their enthusiasm and dedication to what they are doing is obvious to anyone who comes into contact with them or their work, and I am looking forward to reading much more about their future successful endeavors as they continue on their journey of discovery and honoring those lives who have previously been ignored or unknown.

 However, I would be remiss if I did not emphasize two important points mentioned in the article in the interest of clarification:

 1st:  The Cesar family were FREE Black people, not FREED Black people, because they had never been enslaved in the first place as I spoke about in the documentary during the Q&A session which followed (Director’s Discussion - Coloring Our Past) on YouTube.

 2nd: The variations in the spelling of the names of both people and places was quite common due to not  yet having mandated standards for the verification of names as there are now ( i.e. No driver’s licenses etc…)

 However, the name on the deed to the Cesar property that I pulled and the exact location of it’s whereabouts was documented at least 100 years prior to the acquisition of land by the AT which I believe started to be discussed in the early to mid-1950’s. I found at least one newspaper article that was printed about this in the Hartford Courant in 1956 at the time when the property was first donated to the CT Dept of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) that mentions the phrase: “This farm gets its name from Caesar…who at one time owned it”. I choose to leave out the part of about his being “ a freed slave” which is inaccurate as I stated before.

 So, I hope to have cleared up a couple of long-standing myths about the property name and the legal status of its owners. And I want to again say thank you to everyone who joined in our ZOOM session sponsored by the Noble Horizons website last week, or even those who have taken the time to read this wonderful article about our story in The Lakeville Journal community newspaper.

 God bless! 

Katherine Overton, Cesar Family Griot (“One who tells the story”), lives in Ellicott City, Md.