Lucy Lee: A Romani toddler in Mound View Cemetery?

Written records can only get you so far. I’ve made the searching for obscure records a key part of how I reconstitute stories of the deep past of Knox County.

But there’s little that anyone can do when you run into a situation not covered by written records.

This is one of those.

I stumbled across a tiny entry in the local news briefs in the May 15, 1896, issue of the Mount Vernon Democratic Banner: “Little Lucy Lee, the 5-year-old resident of the gypsy camp west of town, died of brain fever Friday night, and was buried Sunday in Mound View.”

That’s not an excerpt from the news article. That’s the entire article.

A perusal of the records of persons buried in Mound View Cemetery turns up Lucy Lee Sanderson, whose dates match the information given in the article. What is surprising is that the marker for the child is not small and nondescript.

Rather, it is large and prominently placed at the foot of the mound from which the cemetery receives its name.

So, what’s the story behind this?

The newspaper article uses the term ‘gypsy,’ now widely regarded as a racial slur for Romani people. The Romani are descended from a population of people who once lived in northwestern India, in what is now Rajastan.

Forced out by unstable social conditions around the year 1000 AD, the Romani began a long, slow westward migration.

As they began moving into Europe, the Romani began to be referred to by the term ‘Gypsy,’ which was derived from Egypt. Since these people were brown instead of white, calling them Egyptian seemed accurate enough to most Europeans, and the shortened nickname stuck.

The ‘Gypsies’ were regarded as socially inferior outcasts. Europeans would trade with them at times, and run them out of their communities at other times. The Romani groups traveled in family bands, camping in areas before moving along.

Often, they were accused of crimes, some of which they were guilty of, as some Romani groups made use of criminal activities as one of their strategies for survival. Another strategy was selling hand-made jewelry, which was more welcome in some areas than others.

In time, these Romani groups came to the U.S. as well. A Brazilian-born Romani woman named Ann Judge (though she was better known among U.S. Romani as Queen Cleo), died and was buried in Marion, Ohio, in 1905. That event was drew Romani from all over the U.S. to attend.

Offerings are still left at her grave to this day, as a recent photo on the website RoadsideAmerica.com attests.

Though the Romani kept mostly to themselves, there were inevitable situations which happened:

I was surprised when I gave my mother a genetic DNA test for Mother’s Day a number of years ago and the test results showed a small but definite trace of South Asian DNA in Mom’s blood!

The most likely explanation of this is a Romani ancestor in the early colonial period who married a white man on the frontier, before anti-miscegenation laws were in place. Some frontiersmen married Native American Indians, but at least one may have married a Romani with actual Indian roots.

But what about the referenced camp west of Mount Vernon?

Unfortunately, I was unable to find any additional information about it. Considering that the people of the camp sought a gravesite in Mount Vernon suggests that they weren’t very far west of town.

If it was a small band, they could have camped on any farm that allowed them to do so. It may have been a band that was highly successful in producing and selling jewelry, for the location of the grave and the size of the marker would not have been cheap.

This was what might be thought of as the rich corner of the cemetery, at the opposite end from the potter’s field for poor people.

Unsurprisingly, I was unable to find any genealogical information nor legal records pertaining to these folks.

If anyone has any further information about this or other Romani groups that have passed through Knox County, let us know!