By Jennifer Amato
Staff Writer
EAST BRUNSWICK – A local resident is working on a project to identify descendants of slaves who have ties to the East Brunswick area.
“America’s history is fully detailed and very rich in context and East Brunswick has a role in that,” said Richard Walling, director of the Old Bridge Village Heritage Center.
During a recent presentation, Walling provided information about Jacob Van Wickle and James Outcalt, two judges of the Court of Common in Middlesex County Borough who used their power to circumvent the law and issue bogus certificates of removal to force individuals into permanent slavery in 1818.
He said women and their children were provided with certificates of removal to Point Coupee, Louisiana, to serve Charles Morgan and Nicholas Van Wickle.
“Their lives were torn asunder by greed and indifference,” Walling said. “This was done not to a fictional character in a movie but to all these women whose lives they dedicated them to their children.”
Walling said that there was “deliberate omission” of more than 100 slaves’ birth and death records, “no story of each person’s individual humanity.” Due to this early instance of human trafficking, he said the Van Wickle Project has developed to locate the descendants of the slaves.
“We’ve been very fortunate in having been able to locate some family members of the original group” through DNA and oral history, Walling said. “Generations will once again be bonded by ties of family.”
“Slavery is a very ugly part of American history, but it is a part of American history that must be told. Just because it isn’t written, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. This is a chance for the story to be told, for you to tell your friends, to make sure things like that never happen again,” said Bruce Morgan, branch president of the NAACP, New Brunswick.
The Van Wickle segment, featured on “This Week in East Brunswick,” can be viewed at youtu.be/mqLD_n9doUU.
