Inspired by Henry Ossawa Tanner’s family tree, Strawberry Mansion Civic Association holds family history workshop

Judith Robinson, a North Philadelphia resident who is co-director of the Friends of the Tanner House, was at a fundraiser to help preserve the historic house on Diamond Street a few months ago, when she said a lightbulb went off.

Lewis Tanner Moore, a grandnephew of the artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, donated a poster of the Tanner family tree to the Friends group at a May fundraiser at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts.

“The Tanner family [members] are our North Philadelphia ancestry,” Robinson said Thursday. “They are going to lead the way for us to amplify and elevate ourselves as a community.”

She said she sees the work to preserve the Tanner House and the upcoming community workshops as a way to “elevate the whole of North Philadelphia.”

The Tanner family lived at 2908 W. Diamond St., a National Historic Landmark which has fallen into disrepair. Stabilization work began at the house earlier this week.

“This house has given us a family to use as an example of how they had rules, and they showed us how they amplified themselves into prominent members of society, despite the racism they faced, to excel as a family.”

Tanner’s mother, Sarah Elizabeth Miller Tanner, came to Pennsylvania through the Underground Railroad. The formerly enslaved child later went to college and became an educator, she noted.

To that end, Robinson, as a leader of the Strawberry Mansion Civic Association, plans to use the Tanner family tree to inspire people, in North Philadelphia especially, to discover their own family history in two workshops on Sunday called: “Family Gathering: Finding Our Roots.”

The same workshop will take place at two times: from 1 to 3 p.m. and again from 3 to 5 p.m. on July 30 at the Hatfield House, 33rd Street and Girard Avenue in Fairmount Park.

Robinson said the point of the workshops, which are free to the public, will be twofold:

“We want to help them complete their own family tree and give them information about how to untangle titles.”

Participants will learn how to research public records to discover family history to resolve tangled titles to family homes. In the second part of each workshop, an artist will help participants create their own family trees.

» READ MORE: A Landmark's Future: The North Philadelphia rowhouse where Henry Ossawa Tanner and his family made history is at risk of demolition. How did it end up like this?

The family tree makes clear that Henry O. Tanner, who studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before he moved to Paris and became an internationally acclaimed artist, was far from the only accomplished member in the family.

Several of the artist’s relatives — his mother, father, sister, niece, and others — reached major educational and professional heights, both during slavery and barely one generation after slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865.

While Henry Tanner’s father, Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner, was born free in Pittsburgh to a free Black family, Tanner’s mother, Sarah Elizabeth Miller Tanner, escaped from slavery as a child when her mother sent her and her 11 siblings away in a wagon to freedom in Pennsylvania.

Sarah Tanner was adopted by a family and she attended Avery College in Pittsburgh, where she met her husband, the bishop.

Henry Tanner’s sister, Dr. Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson, who was born in 1864 as the Civil War was winding down, graduated from Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1891 at age 27.

She started medical school at age 24, as a young widow with a small child. Dillon Johnson decided to become a doctor to support herself and her child after her first husband died a few months after their baby was born. After medical school, she worked as a doctor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

In Alabama, Dillon Johnson became the first woman — of any ethnicity — to be licensed to be a medical doctor in the state.

And Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the artist’s niece, was the first Black person to earn a doctorate in economics in the United States when she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1921. She later graduated from Penn’s law school when she could not find work as an economist because of her race. She and her husband, Raymond Pace Alexander, filed early school desegregation lawsuits in the Pennsylvania suburbs in the 1930s.

To attend the free Family Gathering workshop on Sunday, July 30, people are asked to RSVP here. Or, go to https://savethetannerhouse.org/general-1 for more information.