‘Hello, Cousin’
Two women traced their roots to Rappahannock County and then discovered they were related — through slavery. After reckoning with racism and receiving national attention, the cousins are speaking at a community event next week.
Connected through slavery, a Black woman and a white woman discovered their past — and each other. Now, Betty Kilby Baldwin and Phoebe Kilby are returning to Warrenton to discuss their new book, “Cousins,” published to wide acclaim in 2021 and already in its second printing.
While Betty and Phoebe are receiving national attention — they’ve been featured on the BBC and most recently, Betty appears in Episode
2 of the Net ix series, "Stories of a Generation with Pope Francis” — their story is a local one. It’s also a fascinating one, encompassing genealogy, slavery, racism, and forgiveness.
It all started with Phoebe Kilby researching her genealogy in 2006. At rst, it was relatively simple, as she found a family member had done an extensive family tree online. The Kilby family owned farms in Rappahannock and Culpeper counties in the 1800s.
While working at Eastern Mennonite University, Phoebe became aware of an organization called Coming to the Table, which is a gathering of descendants of white slave owners and enslaved people. It started her thinking, since her genealogy put her ancestors in the south during slavery, “I wonder if my family owned slaves?”
So started a sleuthing detective story for Phoebe that encompassed free time and vacations for years. The rst trip was a visit to the Rappahannock Historical Society in Little Washington. “They were wonderful there,” she said. She found her great grandfather, Leroy Kilby, on the 1840 census, and he was listed as owning two slaves. “In those days, they didn’t name the slaves in the census, since they were considered property,” she says.
Further research led to family wills where the names were identi ed: Sarah and her daughter Juliet. Records from a court case in 1865 involving the ownership of the family slaves revealed Sarah had passed away, and Juliet was listed as having four children.
Now Phoebe’s curiosity grew even more. What had happened to them?
Now the story should switch to Betty Kilby Baldwin, who has a fascinating story of her own. An African American raised in Warren County, Betty was the plainti in a successful lawsuit led by her father to allow her and her siblings to attend the county high school, which was still white-only even years a er Brown vs. Board of Education.
Betty went on to college, then to the corporate world where she became an executive. She holds a BA in business management, an MBA, and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Shenandoah University.
Betty was doing her own research, not so much on her own ancestry, but on the free negro community in Front Royal. She knew from family lore that she was descended from a slave owner in Rappahannock County, a fact which upset her father greatly. “At rst, my father was involved in my research, but it became too painful for him,” she said.
The research was emotional for Betty too, and she wrote her rst book about her experiences, “Wit, Will, and Walls,” which, she says, helped her work through her feelings. “I had already come to terms with having white blood, which I knew from family
lore,” she says. “But I didn’t feel the book had a solid ending.”
Turning back to Phoebe’s story, her research had progressed. She had read Betty’s book, and had strong circumstantial evidence that Betty was connected to her family. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2007, she reached out to Betty. Her email started, “My name is Phoebe Kilby, and I am white. My father grew up in Rappahannock County, Virginia, near where your father grew up. I have been doing some research on my family. I suspect that our families had some kind of relationship in the past.” Betty’s reply came a few hours later. The subject line of her email: “Hello, Cousin.”
That was the beginning of an incredible relationship that encompassed friendship, family, and healing. DNA testing revealed that they were indeed related. Betty was a descendant of Juliet.
“Phoebe’s research lled in the holes to my story,” Betty said. “It was almost like the solid ending that Wit, Will, and Walls lacked.”
Together, they wrote a book about their experiences called “Cousins: Connected through Slavery” published in April 2021.
Proceeds from the book go to the Kilby Family Endowed Scholarship, a scholarship fund created by Phoebe with some of her family inheritance. “I was raised in a racist household, and I don’t think this is what my father thought would be done with the money,” she says. “But my family had pro ted from slavery in the past, and I felt I should do something to make amends for slavery and everything since.”
The scholarship is open to anyone descended from slaves in Rappahannock, Culpeper, and Madison counties, with preference given to descendants of Kilby family slaves. Three of Betty’s grandchildren are now recipients from the fund and are attending college.
The purpose of the scholarship, of course, is to help with education expenses. But neither Betty nor Phoebe suspected at the beginning that it would serve another purpose as well. Betty explains, “The scholarship makes my grandchildren aware of their past, and how we all got to where we are today.”
Phoebe Kilby: “My father grew up in Rappahannock County, Virginia, near where your father grew up. I have been doing some research on my family. I suspect that our families had some kind of relationship in the past.”