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CHARLES LEWIS BLAND
1941 – April 26, 2020
Charles:
“Back in North Carolina during the Fifties, my uncle Berry Jewel Bland began collecting information about his ancestors. Visits with my father to Berry’s home, infrequent though they were. became trying to my teenage patience. No sooner would conversation lull , giving rise to the hope that my father would gather up his things and leave than Berry, rising and walking like a monk to his prayers, would go to his closet and take out a box full of musty papers, his latest findings, and the visit was extended indefinitely. Once Berry handed me a sheet that listed my name as the son of Bruce Steven Bland and Frances Faries. It thrilled me momentarily to think that glacial, grave old Berry had stopped to contemplate me. But my first brush with genealogy did not long hold my interest and my thoughts quickly drifted to other matters.
Years passed. I graduated from High School in 1959, leavinq North Carolina to work for a time in Charleston, South Carolina, before spending four years in Texas and Morocco in the Air Force, then traveling to Nebraska and Missouri, back to North Carolina for two years, back to Nebraska and then to Baltimore Maryland and Washington D.C. for three years. In August 1972, I began work at the State University of New York, Buffalo. The following January, Berry Bland leaving behind what was by then a greatly enlarged mass of genealogical notes that were duly passed to his daughter, Margaret Bland. Several more years passed and at my aunt Wilma Bland’s funeral in 1977, I met Margaret for the first time in a decade. She was just then sorting out Berry’s notes and planned to make it into a book. By then, my genealogical interest had been whetted by the Roots phenomenon. Also, in preparation for my Ph.D. aenera1 examsin history, I had, while reading colonial and revolutionary history, come across various B1ands of historical note. So I began to look forward to Margaret ‘ s work, which came out (continued…)
