On June 11, the journalist paid tribute to his ancestor during a ceremony dedicated to black soldiers who served in the Civil War

WASHINGTON (AP) — It was the middle of the night in the summer of 2021 after I — Darren Sands — finally found the missing piece of my family history.

My great-great-great-grandfather Hewlett Sands, born into slavery in Oyster Bay, New York, in 1820, was one among over 200,000 names listed on the Civil War Memorial in Washington, DC. This meant that he was a soldier who served in a regiment of United States Colored Troops who fought for the Union – and the freedom we still rejoice today.

As the screen lit up, I used to be overcome with a mixture of emotions – anxiety, elation, and pride. This was the first step in understanding his life story. I would like to share what I learn about him!

I had to resist the urge to run to the Spirit of Liberty statue and trace his name etched on the nearby Wall of Honor with my fingers. I held back until the sun got here up.

On June 11, I returned to the memorial to honor him and all who served our country, which for its first two centuries viewed most Black people as other people’s property. On Wednesday, in a special ceremony, I helped proceed greater than 150 years of commemoration of enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, when on June 19, 1865, I learned that that they had been freed. It has long been a sacred holiday for a lot of black Americans, nevertheless it was only recently recognized as a federal holiday.

I didn’t go only for myself and my family. I wanted to rejoice too Frank Smithcivil rights activist and memorial director whose work to preserve lesser-known American history helped me understand where I got here from and who I used to be.

One of Smith’s biggest wishes is for the National Park Service to assign a full-time ranger to the memorial. If there was ever a candidate, it might be Marquett Awa-Milton. I first met him after I got here to find the name of my ancestor. He serves the memorial daily in full Civil War regalia, and after I arrived he was taking selfies and petting visitors with a rifle hanging above his head.

Soon the ceremony began. Smith, who once presided over the event with only his staff and little fanfare, opened the ceremony by greeting about 150 people, a lot of whom were in the shade as temperatures rose. Smith then asked me and twenty other volunteers to read the names of soldiers who were in Galveston after the end of the war, including the twenty sixth. After I read the name Hewlett Sands aloud, I took my wife Jummy’s hand and showed her the tiny corner of the monument symbolizing his sacrifice. I felt again the same mixture of pride and gratitude that I first felt in the summer of 2021.

“Congratulations on finding your ancestor,” Smith told me again last week, just as he told me the first time in 2021 after I found the Hewlett Sands connection. I feel it says the same thing to anyone who finds their ancestor on the wall, thanks to all the men who sacrificed themselves.

I learned about Hewlett Sands while researching my family history, hoping to weave it into a book I’m writing about Coretta Scott King’s work to try to transform America into a peaceful society after the assassination of her husband, Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968.

In the many a long time since the Civil War, there was much displacement amongst my ancestors; people left and never got here back, and lots of family histories were lost.

But I do know the men of Sands served bravely in World War II. The newspaper ran a headline about “Sands Family Fights” with photos of several of them. We knew far more about World War II than we did about the Civil War.

According to the records I discovered, Hewlett Sands was born on November 29, 1820, into the home of the Townsend family, a wealthy and influential family on Long Island that held many enslaved people before New York abolished slavery in 1827.

It is unclear to me how he spent most of his life between 1820 and 1852. He apparently worked as a farm laborer and whilst a clam digger. When he was 32, he met and married a young widow named Anne Amelia Payne, who took Sands as her surname.

In April 1861, Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, starting the Civil War.

In January 1864, Hewlett Sands received a $300 bounty and joined the twenty sixth U.S. Colored Troops because it prepared for war with 1000’s of other soldiers on Riker’s Island. His draft documents show that he was 42 years old, although in fact he was about to turn 44 years old.

According to military records, after surviving difficult conditions at camp, his regiment boarded a ship called the Warrior in March 1864 for South Carolina, where it participated in the Battle of Honey Hill and other engagements.

Life after the war for Hewlett Sands was defined by a series of economic difficulties. He fell and lost sight in one eye; and he he lost his inheritance he intended to pass it down to his family from generation to generation. He died on April 8, 1901 at the age of 81.

But his and Amelia’s son, James Edward Sands, married and had two children, one among whom was Alfred Sands. Among Alfred’s children was my grandfather Alonzo, who served with his brothers in World War II. In June 1960, Alonzo and Catherine Sands gave birth to a boy, Lonnie, who is my dad.

Like Hewlett Sands, I grew up on Long Island in the town of Roslyn, where I developed a love of reading. I first examine the lifetime of Martin Luther King at the Bryant Library, and at age 11 I used to be giving speeches about him and his influence on my life. It was in Roslyn that I made a decision, as a boy, that I wanted to be a journalist, after a compassionate Newsday reporter visited me to explore our family’s history in a story about a neighborhood controversy.

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Now, working as a journalist on the Juneteenth story, I feel like a part of my mission is to educate and inform people about all of it. And to give you the chance to share it with my dad, my mom – my whole family.

I feel very strongly connected to the concept that Hewlett Sands risked his life not just for his family, but in addition for a higher ideal. I feel what all of those men had in common was the feeling that they were doing something that will impact generations they’d never meet.

No one alive has ever seen Hewlett’s grave, and I went there recently. On a clear day, my dad and I discovered his gravestone with the words What. D twenty sixth US INF. Somehow we felt a little closer to him and a little closer to one another.