The Past Revealed

It was the fall of 1983, and Lynette Boggs-Perez, then a junior at the University of Notre Dame, accepted a last-minute invitation to join a friend for a trip to Athens for the Georgia-Auburn football game. What began as a spontaneous weekend getaway would ultimately lead to the discovery of long-held family secrets, changing how Boggs-Perez sees herself and her heritage.  

A city attorney for Little Rock, Arkansas, Boggs-Perez was born in 1963 in Washington, D.C., and raised as a “military brat” in Germany and Italy. Though her family’s frequent relocations meant she never had a true “hometown,” they often visited her great-grandmother, Hortense (Hortie) Howell, on Fairview Street in Athens.  

And so, when her friend came down the dormitory hall looking for someone to drive with her to Athens from South Bend, Indiana, to see a boy she’d met that summer, Boggs-Perez decided to go and visit “Mama Hortie,” as she was called. What made the trip unique was that it was the first time in her life that Boggs-Perez and Howell were together without anyone else from the family. “I had this very rare weekend with my great-grandmother,” she says. “It was always a group going to Athens, and this was the first and only time it was just me and her.” 

Boggs-Perez remembers that November weekend as “profound”—a visit when her great-grandmother seemed to see her as an adult. They had grown-up conversations on topics that they’d never discussed before. She vividly recalls the conversation turning to her mother’s paternal grandparents, Robert and Maggie Anderson, and her great-grandmother matter-of-factly saying a name Boggs-Perez had never heard before. As Boggs-Perez told a rapt audience in March at the Lyndon House for a Historic Athens History Hour, her great-grandmother said, “[Anderson] ain’t his real name. He’s one of those Hodgsons.”  

In shock, questions flooded Boggs-Perez’s mind. Anderson was the only name she had ever heard associated with her mother’s paternal side of the family. Did her mother know about “those Hodgsons”? Should she tell her? She thought of the many relatives who were “Andersons.” To think that wasn’t their name—her name—was overwhelming. “I was scared to even ask a question,” Boggs-Perez says. “I just sat there and listened and let her talk.” 

A few months later, Mama Hortie passed away, and Boggs-Perez tucked away the Hodgson name for 40 years.  

A life unfolds 

In the decades that followed, Boggs-Perez built a distinguished career and reared a family of her own while her ancestor remained unknown. After graduating from Notre Dame in 1985, she moved to Oregon, competed as Miss Oregon in the 1990 Miss America Pageant, and earned a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Boggs-Perez married and became a mother of two children. In 1999, she made history by becoming the first woman elected to lead a City Council ward in Las Vegas, and she also served as a Clark County commissioner.  

Boggs-Perez worked on former President George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, and in 2004 he appointed her a citizen trustee of the United States Naval Academy. She earned a law degree from St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas, in 2012, established her own practice and tried “probably more than a hundred cases.” In 2017, she married and blended families with Eli Perez, and they moved to Little Rock in 2020.  

Forty years ago, Boggs-Perez didn’t know what questions to ask. As she grew older and learned more about the world, she grew curious about what she had learned that weekend in Athens. As a 20-year-old, she had never seen a photograph of her great-grandfather, Robert, who died about 11 years after her birth. Although her mother described him as someone who could “pass” for a white man, Boggs-Perez had “no idea what he looked like.” Other Anderson relatives had wavy hair and light eyes, she says, but it was difficult to confront the idea that someone in her ancestry was the result of the darkest part of America’s racial history. 

Uncovering the truth  

Boggs-Perez’s mother, Janice Barber, 88, says she remembers little about her grandfather Robert, who was born in 1861.  “He looked like someone white,” Barber says, “and my grandmother definitely looked African American.”  

Speaking from her home in Sammamish, Washington, Barber says Robert was already “quite old” by the time she was born. When she was three, she and her parents moved to Washington, D.C., as part of the Great Migration—a period when many African Americans left the South in search of greater freedom and greater economic opportunity–so she wasn’t around Robert for very long. He died in 1942. 

“I didn’t know anything about his history, why he looked so much different from my grandmother,” Barber says. “Little kids don’t make that difference. I just loved him because he was always hugging me and putting me on his shoulders.” 

It wasn’t until Barber got older that relatives told her that her grandfather’s birth was the result of a nonconsensual encounter between his mother and the man who enslaved her.  

Discovering that you have European ancestry is no longer that unusual in the African American community, especially at a time when roughly 50 million people have added their DNA to commercial ancestry and health databases. The rise of genetic ancestry testing through platforms like Ancestry.com, and the popularity of programs such as PBS’s “Finding Your Roots,” have led more people to uncover hidden family histories. Before this technology, many of those secrets remained concealed.  

When Boggs-Perez and Eli became empty nesters, she decided to revisit that long-ago revelation. “I finally had time to focus on me and the things that are important to me,” Boggs-Perez says. “We need to be able to preserve these stories.” 

Boggs-Perez credits her legal training, research skills, and the advantages of modern technology with helping her solve the mystery. In the summer of 2023, she used those tools to uncover the identity of Robert’s father. 

Connecting the dots 

To substantiate her great-grandmother’s assertion, Boggs-Perez submitted her DNA to Ancestry.com and began building a family tree. Using historical records, census data and records from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she began the arduous task of tracing Robert’s lineage, searching for the missing link. A citation in a doctoral dissertation led her to a site that listed slaveowners of Clarke County in alphabetical order.  

After a false start—she thought her great-grandmother had said “Hardison,” not “Hodgson” — she found the name “Hodgson, Edward Reginald”, who was about 45 years old in 1861, the year Robert was born. He appeared to be her great-great-grandfather. From there, she was able to find “slave logs” for E.R. Hodgson, and found an unnamed woman listed who was about 30 years old in 1861 and, by deduction, would likely be her great-great-grandmother, Phillis. There was no question in her mind that she had found her roots.  

While confident, Boggs-Perez says she wanted to make sure all of her information was factual before contacting any relatives. “I knew my goal all along was about connecting with this (Hodgson) family,” she says. “I didn’t know if they knew about Robert Anderson. I didn’t know if they knew about me. I didn’t know what they knew. But I was going to be the one who was going to connect the dots and end the secrets, once and for all.” 

What gave her the degree of confidence she needed was the DNA. After getting her results from Ancestry.com, she examined her Thrulines, connections that “help you see how you might be related to your DNA matches,” according to the Ancestry.com website. She searched the name Edward Reginald Hodgson and asked if any people shared this common ancestor. Six Hodgsons — those who had also submitted their DNA to the site — popped up on the site. And one of the matches had a photo of E.R. Hodgson.  

“That was what made me just drop my jaw and stare at a screen,” Boggs-Perez says. “I looked at this person, and I immediately knew that I was related to him because I could see my own features in his picture – it was shocking. To me, there was no dispute because I looked as much like him as any relative that I have known the entirety of my life.” 

She showed the picture to her mother, who said, “Oh, I see where I get my dimples from.” 

Meeting in person 

The Hodgson family were carriage builders who arrived in Athens in 1839, having immigrated from Retford, England, in the 1820s. They first lived in Troy, NY, and then moved to Carlinville, IL, before moving south to Athens, a climate said to be better for E.R.’s asthma, according to a family history book. They opened a shop on Oconee Street (currently the Hodgson Oil Building, owned by the University of Georgia) and built great wealth through business and industry. E.R. Hodgson had 11 sons and one daughter with Anne Bishop. He died in 1874.  

Boggs-Perez began to reach out to the Hodgson descendants she found via Thrulines. Two of them joined her at the recent History Hour in Athens.  

In July 2023, nearly 600 miles from Boggs-Perez’s home in Little Rock, Tom Hodgson opened Facebook to a long message from someone he didn’t know. Boggs-Perez told him she had been researching her family tree, and discovered they have a common great-great-grandfather born in England. Tom recognized E. R.’s first name. 

“There wasn’t a photo to know that she’s a Black woman in her message, but she was dead-on with so much,” says Tom. “These days your first reaction is to not trust it. If she had said, ‘Hey, I’m Lynette, I think we might be long-lost cousins,’ I may have ignored it. But she didn’t say that – she said all the facts.” 

Tom continued to communicate with Boggs-Perez and one day as he was sitting in his office, which has framed photos of generations of his Hodgson ancestors adorning the wall above his desk, he got another message. “She forwarded me a photo of who she said was the slave owner—the one who started all this trouble,” he remembers. “And I looked up and there’s the same photo hanging on the wall.” 

Another cousin Boggs-Perez met is Mark McKinnon, a political advisor and reformer who frequently appears on CNN. The two had met years earlier, as they both moved in similar Republican circles. McKinnon, who lives in Denver, was thrilled to learn of his connection to Boggs-Perez through E.R., his maternal great-great-great-grandfather. He acknowledges that their connection was born out of a painful chapter of American history, but he eagerly embraced the opportunity to reconnect with Boggs-Perez and Tom, whom he hadn’t known well growing up. “It’s not just our story, it’s the story of America,” McKinnon says. “It’s even the story of Georgia.” 

Last fall, the three cousins met for the first time in Athens at Tom’s house. His wife was ill and would pass away in January. McKinnon had recently lost his mother, sister and brother, and Boggs-Perez’s brother had also recently died. This new cousin connection was healing for all of them. Both Hodgson and McKinnon say they’re grateful to Boggs-Perez for bringing them together. And the discovery has shaped Boggs-Perez in ways that she could not have imagined. It has also fueled the desire to know more. 

Following her spring visit to Athens, Boggs-Perez learned that Phillis had two other children that she believes E.R. fathered named Peter and Sally. After emancipation, Phillis married, and the couple and three children moved to Burke County. Records show Phillis, her husband and Sally eventually living in Micanopy, Florida.   

Boggs-Perez says she bears no animosity toward E.R., because he is part of her DNA. If it weren’t for him, she would not exist. The secrets were closely held because slavery and the mixed parentage that could result from it are abhorrent and painful parts of our history. “There’s no scenario where someone could consent – absolutely not,” she says of Phillis. “Because she was owned. She was property. That’s a hard reality.”  

Boggs-Perez sees this new familial connection as an opportunity for reconciliation at a time when the country still struggles with race. Previous generations couldn’t tell this story, but her’s can. “Our generation and younger, we’re finally in a place in history where I think we can have this conversation,” she says. “You don’t have to sugarcoat it. Just tell the story.” 

Discovering her roots has also changed how Boggs-Perez sees herself and given her a greater understanding of another aspect of American history – those who chose to come to America seeking a better life. Toward the close of her Lyndon House talk, Boggs-Perez reflected on her journey, recalling words from Maya Angelou’s powerful poem, “Still I Rise”:   

“I rise because I’m the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise,” Boggs-Perez quoted. “But now I know more of my own story. I’m not only the dream and the hope of the slave, but I’m also the dream and the hope of the immigrant. I am America.” 

Kimberly Davis is a fourth-generation Athenian who has been a writer and editor for 25 years.