Through parallel genealogical searches and DNA testing, two Sidwell Friends alumni have uncovered a common ancestry and unlocked their family histories.

For years, Sidwell Friends students Ben Lorenz and Johnisha Matthews, both members of the Class of 1995, sat in the same classrooms, passed by one another in the hallways, and served together on the staff of Horizon. Both came from biracial families at a time when there were fewer students of color at Sidwell Friends. Their senior year, both students went on a college tour together. After graduation, they stayed in touch from time to time: Lorenz helped out in the search for Matthews’s father when he wandered from the family home, and Lorenz subsequently attended a lunch after her father’s funeral service. They are also both part of a Sidwell Friends alumni text chain that started during the pandemic. 

Then, in 2024, the unexpected brought them together in a way neither could have imagined. Independently, their quests to learn more about their ancestral histories intersected five generations in the past with the person of Robert Kelley. He is a common ancestor—a onetime enslaved man who was born around 1796 in Charles County, Maryland, drove a wagon in support of that state’s troops during the War of 1812, and died a free man in 1887. Kelley’s restored headstone stands today in St. Ignatius Cemetery in Port Tobacco, Maryland—a testament, it says, to a man whose “character was above reproach and died as he had lived, honored and respected by all.” 

How Ben Lorenz and Johnisha Matthews Levi, as she is now known, came to learn of their connection is a story of generational perseverance, the meticulous preservation of certain U.S. military documents, new ancestral research tools, the determined work of descendants of a slaveholding family, DNA testing, and, in the end, a hunch.

Lorenz’s genealogical search began in 2023 when he picked up the work his mother had started nearly 30 years before. She had discovered the history of her great-grandfather, James Kelly. (Spellings of family names, especially those of enslaved people, are often inconsistent in the records.) The family story as it had been passed down was that, as the Civil War was beginning, James, 20 years old at the time, escaped from slavery in Port Tobacco and enlisted in the 32nd United States Colored Infantry as a substitute soldier under the alias “William Turner.” Later, during Reconstruction, Kelly and his new wife migrated to Washington, DC, and, as Lorenz describes it today, “attempted to pull themselves up by their bootstraps despite limited access to education, living wages, adequate housing, and medical care.” 

Lorenz, a physician and researcher who specializes in infectious diseases, remembers his mother telling him early on in the family’s dive into their ancestral history that, although she knew they had Civil War soldiers in their lineage, “We had never stopped to think of their sacrifice and what that sacrifice meant to our family.”

The family also knew that the Kellys had historic ties to Saint Ignatius, a Catholic church in Port Tobacco. Sadly, most of the parish’s records were lost in an 1866 fire that badly damaged the church. Still, Saint Ignatius, which was rebuilt and today overlooks the Potomac River about 30 miles south of Washington, DC, would later play a pivotal role in the discovery of the Lorenz and Matthews family connection. 

What did initially open up the search was the uncovering of James Kelly’s Army pension file, which was located under his alias, William Turner, at the National Archives. “These files were key,” says Lorenz of his mother and father’s research. “They helped us piece together the family connections that were broken after decades of anonymity in slavery and subsequent exodus from Port Tobacco.” 

Lorenz eventually picked up the mantle of his mother’s search, inspired by the Georgetown Memory Project, which was created to identify the enslaved people sold by the Jesuits in 1838 to save the university from bankruptcy. The project has shone a light on research tools of the modern digital age, online genealogy platforms, and DNA testing that he knew could accelerate and expand his search. Lorenz is investigating if members of the Kelly family were part of that sale.

It was that motivation and understanding that led him to a major breakthrough when he found a photo online of Robert Kelley’s headstone. The marker, which clearly had been neglected and damaged over time, had been carefully reassembled and restored. It was unusually large and refined, particularly for a formerly enslaved person. The inscription provided a clue.

In memory of

ROBERT KELLEYDIED AUG. 25, 1887AGED 93 YEARS

He was a wagon driver for the Maryland troops during the war of 1812 and with the troops that went to repel the British when they made their landing at Benedict. His character was above reproach and died as he had lived, honored and respected by all. He was the body servant for the late John B. Wills, Sr.

Erected by his youngest daughter.

The photo had been posted online by a member of the Wills family, which had owned a farm in the area of Port Tobacco during the 19th century. Three siblings from the Wills family had uncovered the headstone while preparing to bury their parents in the church’s cemetery and arranged for its restoration.

Lorenz reached out to the Wills family and to the current pastor at Saint Ignatius. Soon after connecting, Lorenz and his mother (descendants of enslaved people) and several members of the Wills family (descendants of slaveholders) drove to the site of the former Wills farm, which is now a historically recognized site under new ownership. Near a weathered wooden tobacco barn from the 1800s, the graves of slaveholders remained overgrown with vines. The resting places of the enslaved were clustered beyond a distant treeline, marked only with daffodils that bloom in springtime. “The world was against these people, but they survived,” says Lorenz. “Being there, I could feel them in my cells.”

During his ongoing search to learn more about Robert Kelley and his descendants, Lorenz would often come across the surname Matthews. He knew that his Sidwell Friends classmate Johnisha Matthews Levi had done some genealogical research on her family. So, on a lark, he reached out to her: “Do you happen to have any Matthews relatives in Charles County?”

Levi not only said that she did but volunteered that her father had been baptized at St. Ignatius. “What? No way!” Lorenz replied. “My dad’s whole family is from there,” said Levi. Lorenz’s research had revealed that Levi’s second great-grandfather was a man named Benjamin Kelly, almost certainly another of Robert’s dozen or more children and a brother of Lorenz’s own progenitor, James. Later, both Lorenz’s and Levi’s DNA tests would confirm their shared blood. 

Like the Lorenz family, Levi, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, had long understood that some of her ancestors had been enslaved, but she had not known their names or their histories. In fact, it was in part the complex history of her family that caused her to undertake her own genealogical research project, some of which she has described in a new book, Number’s Up: Cracking the Code of an American Family, published in June 2025 by The University Press of Kentucky.

Levi, a lawyer and development professional for social-impact nonprofits, began her own quest in 2013. Inspired by Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS show, Finding Your Roots, she started with a DNA test. “The information I got was pretty rudimentary, but I started to create a family tree and kept getting stuck on Seymore Simms, who was my paternal great-grandfather,” she says. Seymore Simms played a large role in Levi’s family story. Simms had raised his own grandson—Levi’s father, John Samuel Matthews—in place of his single, teenage daughter, who was forced by economic necessity to go work in DC as a domestic.

Levi’s father was in his 50s when she was born, the last of 11 much older siblings from her father’s several marriages. Her mother was a first-generation Eastern European Jew. “Because of all that, I grew up as sort of an only child, and my parents were significantly older than most of those of my classmates at Sidwell. But my father and I were close—he was a much mellower version of the father my older siblings had—and for that reason, learning more about his relationship with his grandfather was especially meaningful.”

One of the family stories her father told her centered on his own youth and a well-known Charles County, Maryland, family, the Mudds, who were descendants of Samuel Mudd, the doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth after Booth was injured in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Later, Levi read an article in The New Yorker that mentioned Mary Simms, a formerly enslaved woman who had provided crucial testimony in Mudd’s trial that resulted in his conviction for helping Booth. Whether Levi is related to Mary Simms through her great-grandfather Seymore Simms hasn’t been proved, but the question propelled her to pursue some focused genealogical research on the question.

She recalls the day when she received a copy of Seymore Simms’s death certificate from the Maryland State Archives. “It didn’t have the exact date of his death, only an approximation,” she says. “But seeing his name and knowing how much he had meant to my father—who is now gone, too—well, I cried for about a half-hour after opening the letter. He died a few days after Christmas, and I know how devastating that was to my 14-year-old father, who now found himself alone in this world.” Levi had been told by her father that Simms was in ill health due to complications from rheumatic fever. Lorenz later was able to use his medical knowledge to translate the medical terms—like “paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea”—that appear on Simms’s death certificate. “Ben was so kind to me, taking the time to write out in plain terms the cause of my great-grandfather’s death,” says Levi. “Every detail helps bring an ancestor into the light as a real person, not just a name.”

Ben was so kind to me, taking the time to write out in plain terms the cause of my great-grandfather's death. Every detail helps bring an ancestor into the light as a real person, not just a name.

Both Lorenz and Levi have continued to work together on this project. Lorenz says he has become “hooked” on his research and recently hired a private genealogist. “I keep pouring over records, documents, and whatever leads I come across, because by finding my ancestors, I can give back to these people their full identity, their full personhood, their humanity,” he says. “So many enslaved people only had first names. Some had the names of their slave-owners. Some had names that were lost or no names at all.”

Levi feels this research also speaks to the political moment. “These discoveries are incredibly meaningful on so many levels, not just personally,” she says. “These people were heroes; they were real people who deserve dignity, even in death. Our enslaved ancestors endured so much only for us, today, to have arrived back in a time where there is a systematic attempt to squash the rights of people of color, to again steal away our rights.” Referring to Lorenz’s work with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Jesuit Society in Maryland, and Georgetown Memory Project, she adds: “That is why what Ben is doing is so important.”

“For me, reconciliation means restoring the memories and personhood of enslaved peoples,” Lorenz says. “I hope to continue to unearth records and information to keep telling more of these stories.”

What began for both as a search for names and simple family connections ultimately became a powerful story of reconciliation and remembrance. The pilgrimage to Port Tobacco and the discovery of untold histories reinforced the importance of preserving and honoring those stories for future generations. As their research continues, each step forward is a reminder of the enduring spirit of those who came before. The descendants of Robert Kelley—through hardship and hope—have left a legacy now intertwined and strengthened with a decades-old Sidwell friendship.