Historian Tracey Wilson –- an educator, scholar, and documentarian of the lives of her town’s enslaved people — leaves behind a lasting legacy that will live on in West Hartford as she passes her torch to the next generation of history teachers and their students.
Wilson, a teacher in the West Hartford public schools for 38 years, was bent on expanding and correcting the historical record, based on her painstaking research into the lives of the enslaved. Her interest in African-American history, which began during her undergraduate studies at Trinity College, was sharpened during a 1977 summer program in West Africa.
A sojourn out to Goree Island, an embarkation site for the slave trade for centuries, put her career on an arc that came full circle to West Hartford Center in the final years of her life. At Goree Island, she imagined the horrors of chattel slavery, and felt revulsion at the inhumanity on which our nation was built. Telling the stories of those who survived the Middle Passage became an important part of her life’s work.
Her archives, which include primary documents and lesson plans created through her Witness Stones/Hidden History program, will be kept at the Noah Webster House and West Hartford Historical Society. She wanted to make her materials available to educators in hopes that local history would remain in the forefront of the American story.
She found that local history provided an enlightening entry point to explore the march of U.S. history over millennia. Each of her history units would begin with a Big Question, which was then answered through the examination of primary documents, role-playing and classroom discussions. A national expert on Advanced Placement U.S. history instruction for high school students, she refused to teach to the test and embraced opening the college-level courses to all students.
She showed students that history mattered. She believed that memory was a force that makes us human and can bind us together. She taught civic engagement too, showing students that they could make history, which they did, helping convince West Hartford civic officials to recognize the town’s enslaved people.
Her research and advocacy transformed West Hartford Center’s landscape.
A word of disclosure: Tracey is my sister, one of four siblings who grew up in Granby.
For decades, we’ve shared a passion for digging through documents to find the truth, then writing about it to inform the broader community, and perhaps create change.
She did so as an historian and educator, while I’ve worked in daily journalism. I’m among the legions inspired by her persistence and courage to illuminate the lives of these forgotten Americans, known only by the first names.
Two years ago, she took her three brothers on a walking tour of West Hartford Center to see what she and her students had accomplished after her retirement from her public school duties.
At the Old Center Cemetery on North Main Street, she showed us her team’s installation of 60 Witness Stones, commemorating the lives of the enslaved. Across Main Street stood the town’s War Memorial, with the name of Prut, an enslaved man who died fighting in the Revolutionary War, etched in the statue. That occurred after fifth graders from Renbrook School, who studied with her, made the case to public officials that the town should add Prut to the honor roll.
Her research in 2004 was central to the West Hartford school board’s decision to name its new middle school for Bristow, a slave who purchased his freedom in 1775 from the Hooker family in the West Division of Hartford, which later become West Hartford.
One of her biggest finds was Bristow’s manumission papers, which she discovered one day folded up in a box of documents in the archives of the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History. We walked up the steps by the West Hartford Public Library to see Bristow’s freedom depicted on the Blue Back Square mural, with a dove spiraling up out of chained arms breaking free.
Around the corner she took us to the street sign for Dinah Road, named for two enslaved women in the West Division in the 1700s. That street name was changed after members of the Mayor’s Council on Youth, working with Wilson and citing her research, convinced the Plan and Zoning Commission and Town Council to honor the women.
Her research and advocacy also played a role in the campaign to retire the West Hartford high school’s Indian-themed mascots out of respect to the indigenous people who were forced from their lands in what became colonial territory in the 1600s. She inspired me to research these issues in my own backyard in New York, which led to revelations I uncovered about one of North America’s most violent massacres that took place in Westchester County in 1644.
Her work continues to resonate. On the day of her death, the Center Church in Hartford dedicated a quilt, made by eighth graders at the Watkinson School who’s studied with Tracey, which honored a family enslaved by the church’s minister in the 1700s.
As her life neared its end, Tracey participated regularly in meetings on the town’s 250th anniversary celebration of the Declaration of Independence in 2026. She insisted that the event include the perspective of the enslaved, highlighting the paradox of freedom in the new nation. Some Americans were freed from tyranny from the British crown, others remained the property of their masters, listed on inventories along with cattle, horses, and farm equipment.
Her determination to correct the historical record endured to the end.
Not long before she died, she visited the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford to see the portrait of Jeremiah Wadsworth, and his son, Daniel, painted in 1784 by noted American painter, John Trumbull, the son of Connecticut’s first governor. Jeremiah Wadsworth was an enslaver and wealthy businessman who bequeathed his fortune to his son, who founded the Atheneum.
Tracey needed to see if the Atheneum had responded to her request that such information be added to the object label by the family portrait. She was displeased to discover that had yet to occur.
I checked for my sister. On Feb. 28, Erin Monroe, the museum’s curator of early American painting, said the label’s revision is underway.
“It is absolutely important to how we consider the history of this museum and its founding, in light of America’s 250th celebration next year,” said Monroe. “We are really leaning into the prioritization of these more complicated histories.”
The community will gather at 11 a.m. for Tracey’s funeral on March 6 at First Church West Hartford, 12 S. Main St., with a reception following at West Hartford Town Hall.
David McKay Wilson, a columnist at The Journal News/lohud.com in White Plains, NY, in the 1980s wrote about public affairs in Connecticut for the Advocate weeklies in New Haven and Hartford, The Boston Globe and The New York Times.