Personal Essay — By Robin Beckham
My Journey
From an interracial family torn apart by prejudice, to a career in broadcast journalism, to the extraordinary discovery of a Gilded Age ancestor — this is the story of how I found where I came from.
Robin, the little cowgirl — long before she knew why.
I was born on January 18, 1964, at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora, Colorado — a child whose very existence stirred up both love and conflict. My father, Reginald, a Black man, had married my mother, Tracee McCrea, a white woman, at a time when their union was far from accepted. They eloped to Minneapolis, Minnesota on February 24, 1963, barely twenty years old, clinging to love in a world intent on tearing them apart.
My maternal grandmother, Shirley, was so opposed to the marriage that she called the police and claimed my father had kidnapped my mother. My Black grandmother, Cecilia Jones, told me this story many times — each retelling thick with disbelief at just how far Shirley had gone to stop them.
Because of those ruptures, I grew up estranged from my mother. The white side of my family lived behind a curtain I couldn't lift. I became a young girl full of questions, longing to know where I fit and who I belonged to. It was that yearning — that ache for history and identity — that would one day lead me straight into the extraordinary discovery of my connection to Amos Jerome Snell, my third great-grandfather.
Along my search, I found relatives who had no idea I existed. My mother had kept me hidden. The shock rippled both ways — their astonishment that Tracee had a child, and my realization that an entire lineage had unfolded without me.
"There I was, a little Black girl in urban Denver, galloping across imagined plains, unknowingly channeling the lives of my ancestors."
Yet even as a child, I somehow felt tethered to a past I had never been told about. I dreamed of being a cowgirl living on a sprawling ranch — the dust, the open fields, the rhythm of horses beneath me. I didn't know then that my maternal ancestors were prosperous ranchers, owners of McCrea's Ranch in Island Park, Idaho, and before that, Trude Ranches in the Shotgun Valley. There I was, a little Black girl in urban Denver, galloping across imagined plains, unknowingly channeling the lives of my ancestors.
My professional life led me into the power of storytelling. For more than twenty years, I worked in television — anchoring, reporting, writing, producing. In 1993, I moved to Pittsburgh to serve as Director of Public Affairs for WPXI-TV (NBC), a role I held for eleven years before stepping into corporate public relations at U.S. Steel.
While living in Illinois, I felt an unexplainable pull toward Chicago — a sensation I carried long before I knew why. The city felt familiar, almost ancestral. Later, I learned that it was: Chicago was where Amos Snell built his empire.
In 2009, I started Beckham Media and launched PittsburghUrbanMedia.com — a platform dedicated to telling the stories of the African American community throughout Western Pennsylvania. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was continuing the legacy of the builders in my bloodline. And now, after decades of telling other people's stories, I know it's time to tell the one story I was born to uncover.