The Infamous Colonel Tye of Kendall Park

“Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.”-- Maya Angelou

Throughout the course of my research, I make attempts to contact family members to understand the spoken history of the people I am researching. The Dean, Van Dyke and Titus families have been especially gracious in sharing information, and in some cases items, from their long family histories.

I have seen documents ranging from a Timber Cutting License to a school book written in 1802 using pounds and shillings. These insights into daily life and death help create the experience of walking through history with the people being researched.

These experiences have been the stepping stones that built my passion and love for historic research. It was during one interesting document search I first came across the story I will tell this week.

While researching the Titus family, I contacted the Plainsboro Historical Society, which had members of this family living in town into the 1970s. The society provided a folder with the family’s history recorded by its own family member.

The leading paragraph of the family’s recorded history immediately caught my eye.

“The Titus Family of Plainsboro are descendants of a slave named Titus who escaped from his master in Shrewsbury, New Jersey on Nov. 22, 1775 who went on to settle in the Kendall Park area."

My research told a very different story. The Titus the family referred to was Titus Cornelius, the infamous ex-slave Colonel Tye.