Daily News | Family heirlooms retrace the history of our Black Founding Father, James Forten
“If I learned about the connection earlier, I think it would have changed my life,” Jacobs said. “I would have taken things a lot more seriously, because I’ve had a lot of fun along the way, and it’s been a great learning experience.”A professional photographer who now lives near Chicago, Jacobs arrived in Philadelphia bearing an important artifact he is lending to the museum for the exhibition — a Bible used to record family history.
“What a fascinating family they are,” Winch said as she looked at the Bible on a table in the museum’s storage and collections workspace. It was a wedding gift to James Forten’s daughter-in-law from St. Philip’s Church in New York City, where she was baptized. The Forten Bible, never before seen in public, is one of several family artifacts that descendants are loaning for the exhibition.
The Forten writing table and the two samplers, Huey wrote in an email, “were passed down from James Forten to daughter Harriet, then to her son, Dr. CB Purvis, then to his daughter, Dr. Alice Hathaway Purvis, then to her son, Rev. John Loring Robie, then to his step-daughter, Sidney June Simpson , and finally to me.” Marcus Huey, who now lives in Phoenix, wrote in an email.The Forten and Purvis families are intimately intertwined.