He Gained His Freedom—Then Enslaved His Own Family. Alexandria’s Newest Exhibit Tells the Complicated Story

ALEXANDRIA, VA — The black-and-white portrait does not reveal the contradictions in Monday Robinson’s life. Born enslaved in Virginia in 1778, Robinson gained his freedom, became active in his community and conducted business with Belle Grove Plantation in Middletown.

But the record then takes a turn that is difficult—and impossible—to forget: Robinson later legally enslaved members of his own family.

That extraordinary and deeply complicated story is at the center of Monday Robinson: A Life of Thorns and Roses, opening Thursday, Oct. 22, at Alexandria’s Freedom House Museum. The traveling exhibition does not squeeze Robinson into an easy category of hero or villain. Instead, it follows the documentary evidence wherever it leads.

Freedom—and a painful contradiction

Researchers believe Robinson may have enslaved relatives in an effort to protect them within a system that offered Black families few safe choices. Yet the surviving documents tell a more unsettling story, too. Robinson hired out his children to area landowners and used his wife and three children as collateral for a loan.

Before his death in 1856, Robinson wrote a will, but questions remained about whether it ensured freedom for his entire family. His brother, serving as administrator of the estate, ultimately secured freedom for nine of Robinson’s children and grandchildren. Freedom also meant leaving Frederick County. Family members scattered to new communities, including Alexandria.

Sixteen years of research reveal a 250-year family trail

The Alexandria connection emerged through descendants associated with the city’s Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial. Working with Robinson descendant Fran Norton Burton, investigative genealogist Char McCargo Bah uncovered previously unknown branches of the family tree.

“The Robinson family can date its ancestry back over 250 years in Virginia and have the honor of being a 250th Anniversary family,” Bah said in the City’s exhibition announcement.

Reconstructing that history took Bah and her fellow researchers 16 years—an extraordinary genealogical investigation spanning generations and jurisdictions. They followed the family through records from Lancaster, Northumberland, Westmoreland, Middlesex, Prince William, Fauquier, Essex, Loudoun, Frederick and Shenandoah counties; the City of Alexandria; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Visitors will see how historians use census records, tax documents, court orders, deeds, apprenticeship papers, emancipation records and wills to recover lives that were often reduced to a line in someone else’s ledger. Together, those records reveal Robinson’s connections to enslaved and free women in Alexandria and his later life in Middletown.

The Alexandria researcher behind the discoveries

Bah is the CEO and owner of FindingThingsforU, LLC, and brings 45 years of experience as an investigative researcher and genealogist. She holds undergraduate degrees in Urban Studies and African American Studies, along with several professional certificates.

Her work has included connecting the Robinson family to its 18th-century ancestors; finding descendants of two Alexandria lynching victims; locating descendants for the Virginia Theological Seminary Reparations Project; and identifying descendants of people buried at Alexandria’s Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial.

Bah has appeared in television interviews and documentaries, including PBS’s History Detectives and a documentary about African American research at Ellis Island. She is the author of two books and more than 80 articles and was named a Living Legend of Alexandria in 2014 for her lasting contributions to the city’s African American history and genealogy.

A story still traveling

The exhibition was created by Belle Grove Plantation and debuted there in September. The team included Belle Grove Executive Director Kristen Laise; descendant Frances Norton Burton; Bah; genealogist, author and historical researcher Brenda Burton Nelson; and digital public historian and exhibit designer Jess Pritchard-Ritter of For the Love of History LLC.

Funding came from Crescent Cities Charities and private donors. After the Alexandria engagement ends Dec. 31, the exhibition will travel to museums and libraries in communities where Robinson and his family lived—carrying the family’s recovered names and stories back across Virginia.

Bah will also give a free lecture, Tracing a Child’s Heritage from the 20th Century to the 18th Century in Virginia, at Freedom House on Sunday, Nov. 1, at 3 p.m. She will use the story of a child buried at Alexandria’s Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial—along with the child’s enslaved relatives, mother and aunt—to explain the challenges of tracing enslaved people, free people of color and families whose members legally owned one another.