On Independence Day, William Holland planned to place a photo of his father outside the traditional African shrine constructed on his family’s land in Franklin County.

Holland’s family scheduled a July 4th reunion to celebrate two different yet related milestones: its hard-won financial independence and its royal Cameroon heritage.

The family built the shrine as a proud signal of this heritage, a result of Holland’s efforts to understand his family’s history from the land of his ancestors in central Africa to the sharecropping and slavery they endured in America.

It’s just as important to him that his family was able to build the shrine on their own historic property. Until just three decades ago, his family was blocked from the privilege of land ownership, he said.

“This is pretty much signifying our independence from this whole system of nonsense,” said Holland, 45. “It’s a very unique day.”

The new shrine, built in June for the occasion, is intended as a space for reflection and meditation, the same purpose such structures serve throughout Africa. On its sides, artist Carolyn Rogers of Rocky Mount has painted a mural to the Hollands’ specifications.

The simple building is intended as a way of displaying their connection to Cameroon royalty, a connection Holland discovered through more than a decade of research that included genetic testing.

He traveled from his home in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to lead the reunion’s special program.

The July 4 gathering was to include a visit from members of Bandjoun Community USA in Maryland, a community group that hails from the region of Cameroon where the Hollands’ ancestors originated. In addition, the group’s president, Le Paul Kuate, planned to speak.

“It will be an opportunity for us to share some cultural and moral values,” said Kuate. He noted that though William Holland has frequently been to Cameroon, other members of the family aren’t as familiar. He looks forward to strengthening the connection between the Holland family and the Bandjoun community.

The Rev. Samuel Anderson of First Baptist Church in Rocky Mount agreed to provide an invocation. The family also arranged for Lynchburg dance instructor Sheron Colston to lead a troupe in a performance of traditional African dance.

The main purpose, however, was for Holland to tell his family their story.

“It’s really to educate people,” he said. “That’s what that day is about.” The Hollands own a historic four-bedroom log cabin built in 1821 in Glade Hill that’s not far from the plantation house where their ancestors labored. They’ve named the house the BaSam Chestnut Palace.

They only recently purchased the land, with many complications before the sale was finalized. Until the 1990s, William Holland said, his father, Sam Holland Sr., grew tobacco and other crops in a sharecropping arrangement while working full time.

William Holland’s research began in 2001 with an interview with his father, who wanted to be a doctor growing up but only received a seventh-grade education. Sam Holland, who died in 2005, provided a lot of important information that got his son started on the right path, verifying things William Holland found in census records.

William Holland said before Friday’s gathering that he intended to play a recording of his father’s voice for the more than 60 relatives and guests expected to attend the special reunion.

He was able to follow the paper trail back to about 1774, when a 12-year-old boy was unloaded from a boat in Chesterfield, taken to Cumberland County, sold to landowners from Bedford with the surname Holland, and from there brought to Franklin County.

The discovery that his great-great grandfather was a slave made to serve in the Confederate infantry led William Holland in 2002 to briefly join the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Paper records could only take him so far, though. He gave a DNA sample to the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation in Utah, which eventually provided him with records the nonprofit had compiled of DNA samples taken in Africa that showed close matches in a particular region of Cameroon in west central Africa.

Armed with names gleaned through the SMGF database, William Holland began visiting Cameroon starting in 2010. His mother, Willie Mae Holland, brother Marvin and sister Wanda visited with him.

His family was told they were the first to come back from the United States to seek their ancestors, he said.

On Independence Day, William Holland planned to place a photo of his father outside the traditional African shrine constructed on his family’s land in Franklin County.

Holland’s family scheduled a July 4th reunion to celebrate two different yet related milestones: its hard-won financial independence and its royal Cameroon heritage.

The family built the shrine as a proud signal of this heritage, a result of Holland’s efforts to understand his family’s history from the land of his ancestors in central Africa to the sharecropping and slavery they endured in America.

It’s just as important to him that his family was able to build the shrine on their own historic property. Until just three decades ago, his family was blocked from the privilege of land ownership, he said.

“This is pretty much signifying our independence from this whole system of nonsense,” said Holland, 45. “It’s a very unique day.”

The new shrine, built in June for the occasion, is intended as a space for reflection and meditation, the same purpose such structures serve throughout Africa. On its sides, artist Carolyn Rogers of Rocky Mount has painted a mural to the Hollands’ specifications.

The simple building is intended as a way of displaying their connection to Cameroon royalty, a connection Holland discovered through more than a decade of research that included genetic testing.

He traveled from his home in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to lead the reunion’s special program.

The July 4 gathering was to include a visit from members of Bandjoun Community USA in Maryland, a community group that hails from the region of Cameroon where the Hollands’ ancestors originated. In addition, the group’s president, Le Paul Kuate, planned to speak.

“It will be an opportunity for us to share some cultural and moral values,” said Kuate. He noted that though William Holland has frequently been to Cameroon, other members of the family aren’t as familiar. He looks forward to strengthening the connection between the Holland family and the Bandjoun community.

The Rev. Samuel Anderson of First Baptist Church in Rocky Mount agreed to provide an invocation. The family also arranged for Lynchburg dance instructor Sheron Colston to lead a troupe in a performance of traditional African dance.

The main purpose, however, was for Holland to tell his family their story.

“It’s really to educate people,” he said. “That’s what that day is about.”

His family was welcomed by the king of Mankon in the Northwest Province, whom William Holland believed was a distant relation based on genetic testing. The next year, the king’s wife, Queen Anna Kiko Angwafo, and two other family members came to visit Virginia and Franklin County at the Hollands’ invitation, to see for themselves what had become of their relatives in America.

William Holland said that the people he’s come to know from Cameroon are baffled by the concept of discrimination based on skin color. “They don’t understand that.”

He continued to trace the family line back further. His inquiries led him to the town of Bandjoun in the country’s West Province. “It took several trips,” he said.

With his DNA-based research taken as far as he can go, he chose this year to build the shrine and hold the family gathering, inviting people from the Bandjoun community in the U.S., people who are distant relatives, to attend. “We’re really, really impressed and really pleased that he’s doing this,” Kuate said.

“This is an African American family that has a long history that goes back before the U.S.,” William Holland said. “It’s not an easy process to go all the way back like what we’ve done. This is a miracle.”