Portrait Of A Family

In all portraits, there resides a living story behind the image frozen in time. As CBS News Correspondent Russ Mitchell reports, in this case, the story is of a family rediscovering itself after six generations, two civil wars and the distance of a great ocean.

"I said Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Do you realize that your great grandfather, Augustus Washington, is famous!" said Cecelia, Augustus Washington's great-great-grandaughter.

There are no pictures of Augustus Washington, only his works. They reflect an extraordinary life, that of a free black man in America before the Civil War. He went to college, ran a business and took a daguerrotype of perhaps the most famous abolitionist of his time, John Brown.

Cecelia knew nothing of her distant relative's life in America until she learned of an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. It was an astonishing discovery for the historians as well.

"I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would find descendents of Augustus Washington, and certainly not living in the Washington metropolitan area," says Ann Shumard, the gallery's curator.

Washington fled to Africa to escape the racial barriers of America in 1853. He settled in Liberia, where he lived out his life as a businessman and politician, and where his descendents were born.

Then, just like their great grandfather a century before, racial hatred and civil war in Liberia sent them fleeing the country in 1992. And in a move steeped with irony, they retraced his steps back to America, where they rediscovered this lost piece of family history.

"Most times there weren't people who wrote history. It was not something that they emphasized or dwelt on, and therefore it got lost," says Aremena Cooper-Hines, Augustus' great-granddaughter.

Not lost was Washington's love of making pictures. Cecilia, like her great-great-grandfather, is an artist. "Now to me I feel that it came from him!" she says.

Settling into America has not been easy for Washington's descendents, but reconnecting with their lost relative has been an inspiration. "If he could do it, we can do it too, you know?" Armena says.