Celedonia Jones, self-taught historian from New York, dies at age 93

Last year, Celedonia Jones, a charismatic, self-taught historian, stood on a plot of land in Manhattan that in the 19th century was part of Seneca Village, a largely black community of about 300 people that would become part of Central Park.

“What happened to the people?” Mr. Jones, who was known as Cal, told “CBS Sunday Morning” for a segment left Seneca villagethat existed between West 82nd and West 87th Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues from 1825 to 1857. “Where Did They Go?”

One of them — Andrew Williams, a free black man who shined shoes and was one of the neighborhood’s first African-American property owners — became the focus of Mr. Jones’ historical research in 2018.

“He was a visionary,” Mr. Jones said in the interview. “I see him building the house down the road.” Then he pointed to a map of the village and said, “You can see his two plots.” (There were actually three.)

Mr. Williams paid $125 for his land and, with the $2,335 he received from the city to leave (not the $3,500 he demanded), acquired property in Queens.

The Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History, a group of scholars dedicated to the study of the site, brought in Mr. Jones as a consultant around 2007. Cynthia R. Copeland, president of the institute, said that because of his knowledge of people at city agencies, he was able to help the group handle their requests with the city’s Parks Department and the nonprofit Central Park Conservancy to get approval for the conducting an archaeological excavation.

The dig, which took place in 2011 in an area near 85th Street and Central Park West, hundreds of artifacts unearthed. Construction of the park began in 1858 and took 15 years.

More recently, Mr. Jones uses census records, property deeds, court and church records, newspapers and photographs to trace the multigenerational lineage of the Williams family.

“Cal put all the pieces together and helped us say with complete confidence that this was the descendant of one of the early settlers,” Ms. Copeland said by phone.

Ariel Williams, Mr. Williams’ great-great-great-granddaughter, said she flew from California to accompany Mr. Jones on his research trips.

“I went to his house, he made pea soup and he gave me a Power Point presentation,” she said in a telephone interview. She added that Mr. Jones “was able to connect all the links in my family that led to me.”

Mr. Jones died of leukemia at his home in Manhattan on April 15, said his daughter, Diane Jones Randall. He was 93. His death was not widely reported at the time, and The New York Times was only recently made aware of it.

Celedonia Jones – he was named after his Cuban-born maternal grandfather, Celedonia Diaz – was born in Harlem on February 21, 1930, one of five children in a poor family. His parents, Joseph and Edith (Phillips) Jones, worked in various jobs. His family moved to different apartments in Harlem to avoid eviction when they fell behind on rent payments.

In high school, he recalled, his teacher, the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, gave him a grade on a historical essay that he thought should have been higher.

“He told me, ‘If you had done a little more research into the history, you could have gotten a 90,’” Mr. Jones said in a 2020 interview with the Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park’s care.

After Mr. Jones responded that history did not interest him, he said, Mr. Cullen told him, “If you become more interested in yourself, you will become more interested in history.”

It took time for that lesson to take hold.

After graduating from high school, Mr. Jones was hired in 1949 as a bookkeeper by the New York City Board of Transportation (which was later replaced by the New York City Transit Authority). Resources Administration and director of fiscal services for the Office of the Comptroller.

By then, he had earned a bachelor’s degree in business management and economics from Empire State College (now University) in 1975.

Before retiring in 1990, Mr. Jones began volunteering with his wife, Dolores (Cain) Jones, at the Museum of the City of New York in Manhattan. Because of his knowledge of the city, and in particular Harlem, where he grew up, he was asked to advise on the content of some of the museum’s exhibitions.

The museum’s then-director Robert McDonald recommended that Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger appoint Mr. Jones as Manhattan’s city historian, an unpaid position he held from 1997 to 2005. He later served as historian emeritus while moved on to volunteer at the museum.

“He was the public face of the museum, the greeter at major events,” Sarah Henry, the museum’s chief curator, said by phone. “He loved making people feel at ease. And he was a great dancer.”

As Manhattan’s historian, Mr. Jones recruited historians from diverse ethnic backgrounds to the borough’s community boards; promoted city history by including students in an Association of Student Historians; and created and edited a publication on African American history and culture in Manhattan.

Kenneth T. Jackson, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, said in an email that Mr. Jones was “a public historian in the best sense of the word.”

One of Mr. Jones’s final projects – with his daughter, Mrs. Jones Randall, and his son, Kenneth, his only immediate survivors – was to identify the locations depicted in the photographs in “Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929,” a show being held this year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mr. Jones had sought advice on a previous exhibition at the Met inspired by Seneca Village.

“Cal, a charming, lively man in his early nineties, made several trips into town to verify his building identifications,” Mia Fineman, a curator who organized the show, wrote on the Met’s website, “he craned his neck to count the windows in the facades of skyscrapers.”