Those who volunteered over the recent Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend clearing brush and debris near the cemetery at Sacred Heart Parish in Bowie, Maryland, came for a variety of reasons, including setting an example for their children, working with their classmates, and giving back to the parish. As workers remove leaves and branches from that hillside, the number of unmarked burial places discovered there continues to grow. In the 1700s and early decades of the 1800s, the Jesuits operated a plantation in that area, and the unmarked graves might be the burial places of enslaved people who worked there at that time.

For some, however, the cemetery clean-up is a more personal occasion. This is the case for two African American sisters who grew up in the area.

On Jan. 16, Dr. Veronica Bryant and her sister Dr. Stephanie Locke volunteered in the effort to clear the area behind Sacred Heart’s chapel. Bryant has a doctorate in education and is a parishioner at St. Joseph Parish in Largo, Maryland. Bryant, along with her sister, Locke, an anesthesiologist, is a descendant of the Queen family. Monica A. Queen’s headstone is still intact behind the Sacred Heart chapel grounds. According to the headstone, Queen was born in 1860 and died in 1889. The sisters found out about their ancestral connection after Locke took a genealogy test through Ancestry.com. 

“I was in the physician lounge at my job, and our staff is pretty diverse. So my particular colleagues that day in the lounge, one was from Ghana and the second was from Egypt. I can’t remember whom, but one said, ‘I can trace my family back 3,500 years’ and the other said ‘I can trace my family back 10,000 years,’” Locke said. “At that point, I couldn’t trace my family back two generations. So that’s why I initially took the ancestry [test]. I just wanted a sense of family belonging.” 

Until now, Locke’s sense of family has been very broad.

“It’s been rewarding, because we’ve learned history, we’ve gotten new family connections. There’s a sense of pride. There’s a sense of, not reparations, but something to say we contributed,” Locke said. “As a kid, my mom used to say, ‘all Queens are related,’ and I didn’t believe her until I found family.” 

Locke’s children went to school in Bowie, and she would often drive past the cemetery, but she did not know of any connection to the parish until about four years ago. 

Although the roots of Catholicism and the enslaved in colonial America has a grim history, Bryant said her faith in the religion is still intact. 

“I haven’t lost my faith in the Catholic Church, but it does make you question why and how did we get to this position…Catholicism played a major role in our upbringing, we all went to Catholic schools (and) Catholic churches, participated in all the activities that were of Christianity, (and have) our belief in the pope. We still do,” Bryant said. 

Bryant said she understands that this kind of revelation could impact someone’s perspective on their faith. 

“Those who are the oldest tend to still have a firm belief in Catholicism, the younger generation, they question now. Which we should have probably done, too. But we accepted, this is what is done, we followed these sets of rules, and that was it,” Bryant said. 

Moving forward, Bryant said the best outcome of this process of learning about her ancestry is finding family members. 

“One thing it did bring to us, which we’ll never have a price on, is family,” Bryant said. “So we now are generally richer than we ever thought we were, we may have been broken in spirit, but now we are just filled with pride, and it is just a great joy to be here.”

Although Bryant and Locke are still learning about Monica Queen right now, they remain optimistic about their journey thus far.