The Dansby Family - A Family Out of Enslavement and Into the Future
Marker located at Ellsworth Dansby Jr. Magnet School - on the playground.
Location Details
2160, West Center Street
Visiting Tips
Marker is located behind the school on the playground.
Learn more about The Dansby Family - A Family Out of Enslavement and Into the Future
Joe Dansby was born in Mississippi and was enslaved until after 1861. By 1870 he made his way to Illinois and worked as a barber in Neoga, a town situated along the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad. On December 7, 1875, he married Charlotte Odle in Douglas County, but she died before he moved to Decatur in 1880. Joe worked as a barber in Decatur at several locations just east of the Lincoln Square before becoming a chiropodist, specializing in the treatment of corns. On May 21, 1889, he married the widow of Marcus Cluke, (“mulatto”) Mahala Kendrick (Gamble) Cluke (1853-1906), and helped care for her three daughters - Martha, Mamie and Mattie. Joe and Mahala Dansby also had two children of their own, Ellsworth Harry and Gertrude Jane.
Joe was active in politics, favored the “local option” issue concerning limiting the sale of alcohol, and was a member of Decatur’s Black Elks Club. In 1909, after forty-eight years, he was reunited with his older brother, Jackson H. Dansby, who visited Joe in Decatur. During the Civil War, “Jack” Dansby enlisted in the 59th U.S. Colored Infantry and was stationed mainly around Memphis. He eventually moved near Forrest City, Arkansas, and established the Black town of Dansby. He and his brother Taylor became prosperous cotton farmers in this area just west of the Mississippi state line. Joe and daughter Gertrude visited them in December 1911, the first and last time that he would return to the South.
After wife Luella died, and his children moved out of his house, Joe moved into his business office on East Main Street, in the same building that housed prominent Decatur dentist Dr. James Moore. Joseph Dansby died of pneumonia in St. Mary’s hospital at the age of 65 and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery.
Joseph Dansby
As a teenager, Ellsworth H. Dansby moved in with the family of white dentist Dr. James D. Moore at 360 W. Prairie Avenue and became the family chauffer. Dr. Moore later helped Ellsworth learn the dental technician’s trade and eventually Dansby did all of the laboratory work for Dr. Moore, such as creating dentures. After Dr. J. D. Moore died in 1941, Ellsworth sometimes had difficulty getting other white dentists to give business to his “Dansby Dental Laboratory.” In his will, Dr. Moore gifted his auto and $1,500 to Ellsworth Sr., and $250 cash to each of Ellsworth’s two grown children.
Ellsworth Dansby married Luella F Greenlea Rogan (1897-1978) on January 1, 1914. They had three children, Ellsworth Harry Jr., Gertrude Louise, and Robert William. The family was prosperous and lived in an integrated block on South Boyd Street before building a six-room home at 524 South Haworth. Luella was very active in Black social circles and church, and talented in music and theatrical productions. Ellsworth Sr. was active in local politics, civic groups, and civil rights. He served as president of the local NAACP chapter, was a member of the local Black Masons (Decatur Lodge 17, A.F. & A.M.), and was honored as a trustee of St. Peters A.M.E. Church. In the early 1950s his health started to deteriorate and he died in 1959 at age sixty-eight in the then-named Decatur & Macon County Hospital. He was interred in Decatur’s Greenwood Cemetery.
Gertrude Dansby was educated in Decatur Public Schools and was involved in many musical events and plays at St. Peter’s A.M.E. Church. After her mother died in 1906, she moved in with her maternal grandmother Martha Gamble at 561 South Franklin Street while attending the James Millikin University Conservatory. Before getting her JMU certificate in 1910, she won several art contests including getting a free Millidek yearbook for the “best head piece” drawing and a first place cash prize for her oil painting of a live model. In 1911 she moved to Chicago by herself and worked as a live-in domestic while attending the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago. She was one of eighty students who graduated from there in June 1914, only a few months after her father died.
On November 19, 1915, she married Decatur hotel porter Wormath Dyer, but received a divorce eleven months later and took back her Dansby name. In late 1916 she took a job teaching and supervising an art studio in Covington, Kentucky. Unfortunately Gertrude suffered from inflammatory rheumatism and died in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 20, 1920, at only twenty-eight years of age. A few days later the Decatur Review eulogized her stating, “She was probably the most talented colored woman ever a resident of Decatur.” The location of her remains is unknown.
Born October 5, 1914 in Decatur, he was the son of Ellsworth H. Dansby, Sr. and Luella Rogan, and the older brother of Gertrude Louise Dansby and Robert William Dansby.
Gertrude Dansby was well-known in the community for her musical ability even before she graduated from Decatur High School in June 1934 and enrolled in Millikin University that fall. While at Millikin she majored in music education, was a member of the university “A Capella Choir,” gave private piano lessons, and directed the choir at St. Peter’s A.M.E. Church. After graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1938, she took a job as the head of the music department at the “colored” Deaf and Blind Institute in Austin, Texas, and soon learned how to teach students to read music using braille.
In June 1942 she married Peoria native John Goin Cheeks. The Decatur newspaper reported that they had five hundred people attend their wedding ceremony at St. Peter’s Church, including her older brother Ellsworth Jr. on leave from the military base in Tuskegee, Alabama. When her husband went into the military, Gertrude moved back to Decatur with their infant twin sons, Dansby and John. After the war she enrolled in graduate school at Millikin University. Even though she was highly proficient on the organ as well as classical piano, she now concentrated on voice. After her graduate recital in Millikin’s Kaeuper Hall in February 1949, the local newspaper reported that an “overflow audience” listened to her sing in Italian, French and English before she finished with “Negro spirituals.” Her Master’s project thesis was titled The Historical Background and Development of the Negro and His Songs, and is still available in the archives of the university library.
John Cheeks had a mortuary science degree in addition to his office experiences, so in April 1947 he opened the Cheeks Funeral Home at 468 South Water Street, the first Black-owned and operated funeral facility in Macon County. The ten-room house allowed the family to live above the business until they sold the facility in November 1955. Gertrude went back to full-time work out of the home in 1958 when she became a special education teacher at Progress School. She later taught for six years at Oglesby School before retiring from Mound Jr. High School in 1980. She was a past president of the Council of Exceptional Children and the first recipient of a Mound School “Master Teacher” award.
Gertrude Dansby Cheeks passed away on April 13, 1998 at the age of eighty-one, and was buried at Camp Butler National Cemetery in Springfield, IL.
“Bob” Dansby was the athlete in the family. In his three years at Decatur High School he was a standout in football, basketball and track. At 6’1” and almost 200 pounds, during the track season he participated in high jump, discus and shot put. Decatur High won the May 1941 Big 12 Conference track meet while Bob threw the discus a conference record 154 feet. He took third place in the state meet that year as a senior in that event. The statement next to his senior yearbook photo read – “When the going gets tough, just call in Dansby.”
Bob registered for the draft in June 1942 and in October he and Dola Mae Ferguson became the parents of Geneva Annette Dansby. Bob was drafted in November in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army. When he returned from the service he worked in various positions as a bartender, construction worker, and at his father’s dental laboratory while living at 703 South Greenwood Avenue. He was also active in Decatur’s “Negro” American Legion organization, the Harry Warfield Post 631, and was twice elected president. After a domestic dispute in 1955, his wife and daughter moved to Kansas City, Missouri.
Bob worked at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory in Mount Zion for most of the 1960s and 1970s before also moving to Kansas City. He reunited there with Dola Mae in 1981. Robert Dansby died in Kansas City on November 10, 1997 at the age of seventy-four. He rests in the Leavenworth Military Cemetery in Kansas.
Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, Eunice was the daughter of Presbyterian minister the Rev. Benjamin Heideman and Theo Amsbury. The family moved to Flora, Illinois when she was six years old. She began giving clarinet lessons to other children when she was eleven and later added piano. By the time she was a junior in high school in Neoga, she had forty students. Eunice started as a music major at Millikin University in 1944, and to help pay her way through college she worked as a waitress, library assistant and conductor of church choirs. Starting her sophomore year she also taught a full class load in that school’s preparatory department. She graduated magna cum laude in 1948 with six music-related majors.
She married Decatur-native Ellsworth Dansby in Chicago on September 24, 1949, and the Decatur newspaper specified that the bride was white and the groom was a “negro.”
Deborah Dansby was born in Decatur on July 10, 1950. She began learning the piano at age 3, was in her first dance recital a month before age 5, started on the violin at 7, the clarinet at age 10, and began playing the viola at age 14. By eighth grade she was playing violin with the Millikin-Decatur Civic Orchestra. At Stephen Decatur High School she played violin in the orchestra and clarinet in the school band for two years before transferring to the famous Interlochen Arts Academy and graduating from there with honors in 1968. By 1973 she earned her B.A. and M.A. in music education and performance from the University of Michigan while also playing in the Toledo Symphony Orchestra. She then volunteered for the new arts program of the Peace Corps in Costa Rica, working with the youth orchestra and giving lessons while also playing with the National Symphony for a year before living, teaching, and freelancing in New York City from 1974 to 1977.
“Debbie” then became the director of the Shortridge Magnet School for the Performing Arts in Indianapolis. In August 1978 she married James Leland Still, the son of two public school music teachers. He was principal trombone and she the principal violist in the Marion, Indiana, symphony. They divorced in1983 and Deborah moved to Florida where she created the Fine Tuning Music Entertainment Agency as well as touring internationally with the acclaimed Mantovani Orchestra through 1988. She returned to Decatur in March 1988 as the guest viola soloist for the Millikin-Decatur Civic Orchestra. A few months later she married William Watson Wells, III in Orlando, and spent much of the next decade helping raise his son and two daughters. In 1993 she rejoined the Mantovani Orchestra as principal violist and tour manager until 2015.
Deborah has been a member and past officer of the Central Florida Musicians’ Union for more than forty years and was named a National Arts Associate of the Sigma Alpha Iota national music sorority in 2005. In 2025, at age seventy-five in Orlando, Deborah Dansby is a freelance ensemble performer, soloist, and clinician, while still having the energy to give private string lessons to more than a dozen students.
“Danny” Dansby was born in his grandparents’ house in Decatur on November 27, 1951. His father was working in Chicago and his mother Eunice waited too long before going to the hospital, so Dan was delivered by his uncle, John Goin Cheeks. Dan later attended Oakland Elementary School and Woodrow Wilson Jr High School. After five years of studying violin, he joined the Millikin-Decatur Civic Orchestra in the fall of 1964 while still in eighth grade. For three years at Stephen Decatur High School, he played the coronet in several bands and cello in the orchestra before graduating in 1969 from the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. After attending Parkland and Richland Community Colleges he worked in the records office of the Illinois National Guard in Springfield. On October 17, 1987 he married Patricia Ann Armstrong Gardner and moved to Athens, Illinois.
After graduation from the now University of Illinois-Springfield, he became office manager for the National Guard headquarters in the Illinois State Armory building until 2007. From 2008 to 2011 he worked for KBR as Document Control Manager throughout the Middle East supporting U.S. troops deployed in that region. Before retirement in 2019, he worked for five years in Central Illinois as a printer and computer technician for Compucom, while moving back to the Dansby family residence on Tuttle Street in Decatur where he resides today.
Joe Dansby was born in Mississippi and was enslaved until after 1861. By 1870 he made his way to Illinois and worked as a barber in Neoga, a town situated along the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad. On December 7, 1875, he married Charlotte Odle in Douglas County, but she died before he moved to Decatur in 1880. Joe worked as a barber in Decatur at several locations just east of the Lincoln Square before becoming a chiropodist, specializing in the treatment of corns. On May 21, 1889, he married the widow of Marcus Cluke, (“mulatto”) Mahala Kendrick (Gamble) Cluke (1853-1906), and helped care for her three daughters - Martha, Mamie and Mattie. Joe and Mahala Dansby also had two children of their own, Ellsworth Harry and Gertrude Jane.
Joe was active in politics, favored the “local option” issue concerning limiting the sale of alcohol, and was a member of Decatur’s Black Elks Club. In 1909, after forty-eight years, he was reunited with his older brother, Jackson H. Dansby, who visited Joe in Decatur. During the Civil War, “Jack” Dansby enlisted in the 59th U.S. Colored Infantry and was stationed mainly around Memphis. He eventually moved near Forrest City, Arkansas, and established the Black town of Dansby. He and his brother Taylor became prosperous cotton farmers in this area just west of the Mississippi state line. Joe and daughter Gertrude visited them in December 1911, the first and last time that he would return to the South.
After wife Luella died, and his children moved out of his house, Joe moved into his business office on East Main Street, in the same building that housed prominent Decatur dentist Dr. James Moore. Joseph Dansby died of pneumonia in St. Mary’s hospital at the age of 65 and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery.
Joseph Dansby
As a teenager, Ellsworth H. Dansby moved in with the family of white dentist Dr. James D. Moore at 360 W. Prairie Avenue and became the family chauffer. Dr. Moore later helped Ellsworth learn the dental technician’s trade and eventually Dansby did all of the laboratory work for Dr. Moore, such as creating dentures. After Dr. J. D. Moore died in 1941, Ellsworth sometimes had difficulty getting other white dentists to give business to his “Dansby Dental Laboratory.” In his will, Dr. Moore gifted his auto and $1,500 to Ellsworth Sr., and $250 cash to each of Ellsworth’s two grown children.
Ellsworth Dansby married Luella F Greenlea Rogan (1897-1978) on January 1, 1914. They had three children, Ellsworth Harry Jr., Gertrude Louise, and Robert William. The family was prosperous and lived in an integrated block on South Boyd Street before building a six-room home at 524 South Haworth. Luella was very active in Black social circles and church, and talented in music and theatrical productions. Ellsworth Sr. was active in local politics, civic groups, and civil rights. He served as president of the local NAACP chapter, was a member of the local Black Masons (Decatur Lodge 17, A.F. & A.M.), and was honored as a trustee of St. Peters A.M.E. Church. In the early 1950s his health started to deteriorate and he died in 1959 at age sixty-eight in the then-named Decatur & Macon County Hospital. He was interred in Decatur’s Greenwood Cemetery.
Gertrude Dansby was educated in Decatur Public Schools and was involved in many musical events and plays at St. Peter’s A.M.E. Church. After her mother died in 1906, she moved in with her maternal grandmother Martha Gamble at 561 South Franklin Street while attending the James Millikin University Conservatory. Before getting her JMU certificate in 1910, she won several art contests including getting a free Millidek yearbook for the “best head piece” drawing and a first place cash prize for her oil painting of a live model. In 1911 she moved to Chicago by herself and worked as a live-in domestic while attending the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago. She was one of eighty students who graduated from there in June 1914, only a few months after her father died.
On November 19, 1915, she married Decatur hotel porter Wormath Dyer, but received a divorce eleven months later and took back her Dansby name. In late 1916 she took a job teaching and supervising an art studio in Covington, Kentucky. Unfortunately Gertrude suffered from inflammatory rheumatism and died in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 20, 1920, at only twenty-eight years of age. A few days later the Decatur Review eulogized her stating, “She was probably the most talented colored woman ever a resident of Decatur.” The location of her remains is unknown.
Born October 5, 1914 in Decatur, he was the son of Ellsworth H. Dansby, Sr. and Luella Rogan, and the older brother of Gertrude Louise Dansby and Robert William Dansby.
Gertrude Dansby was well-known in the community for her musical ability even before she graduated from Decatur High School in June 1934 and enrolled in Millikin University that fall. While at Millikin she majored in music education, was a member of the university “A Capella Choir,” gave private piano lessons, and directed the choir at St. Peter’s A.M.E. Church. After graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1938, she took a job as the head of the music department at the “colored” Deaf and Blind Institute in Austin, Texas, and soon learned how to teach students to read music using braille.
In June 1942 she married Peoria native John Goin Cheeks. The Decatur newspaper reported that they had five hundred people attend their wedding ceremony at St. Peter’s Church, including her older brother Ellsworth Jr. on leave from the military base in Tuskegee, Alabama. When her husband went into the military, Gertrude moved back to Decatur with their infant twin sons, Dansby and John. After the war she enrolled in graduate school at Millikin University. Even though she was highly proficient on the organ as well as classical piano, she now concentrated on voice. After her graduate recital in Millikin’s Kaeuper Hall in February 1949, the local newspaper reported that an “overflow audience” listened to her sing in Italian, French and English before she finished with “Negro spirituals.” Her Master’s project thesis was titled The Historical Background and Development of the Negro and His Songs, and is still available in the archives of the university library.
John Cheeks had a mortuary science degree in addition to his office experiences, so in April 1947 he opened the Cheeks Funeral Home at 468 South Water Street, the first Black-owned and operated funeral facility in Macon County. The ten-room house allowed the family to live above the business until they sold the facility in November 1955. Gertrude went back to full-time work out of the home in 1958 when she became a special education teacher at Progress School. She later taught for six years at Oglesby School before retiring from Mound Jr. High School in 1980. She was a past president of the Council of Exceptional Children and the first recipient of a Mound School “Master Teacher” award.
Gertrude Dansby Cheeks passed away on April 13, 1998 at the age of eighty-one, and was buried at Camp Butler National Cemetery in Springfield, IL.
“Bob” Dansby was the athlete in the family. In his three years at Decatur High School he was a standout in football, basketball and track. At 6’1” and almost 200 pounds, during the track season he participated in high jump, discus and shot put. Decatur High won the May 1941 Big 12 Conference track meet while Bob threw the discus a conference record 154 feet. He took third place in the state meet that year as a senior in that event. The statement next to his senior yearbook photo read – “When the going gets tough, just call in Dansby.”
Bob registered for the draft in June 1942 and in October he and Dola Mae Ferguson became the parents of Geneva Annette Dansby. Bob was drafted in November in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army. When he returned from the service he worked in various positions as a bartender, construction worker, and at his father’s dental laboratory while living at 703 South Greenwood Avenue. He was also active in Decatur’s “Negro” American Legion organization, the Harry Warfield Post 631, and was twice elected president. After a domestic dispute in 1955, his wife and daughter moved to Kansas City, Missouri.
Bob worked at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory in Mount Zion for most of the 1960s and 1970s before also moving to Kansas City. He reunited there with Dola Mae in 1981. Robert Dansby died in Kansas City on November 10, 1997 at the age of seventy-four. He rests in the Leavenworth Military Cemetery in Kansas.
Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, Eunice was the daughter of Presbyterian minister the Rev. Benjamin Heideman and Theo Amsbury. The family moved to Flora, Illinois when she was six years old. She began giving clarinet lessons to other children when she was eleven and later added piano. By the time she was a junior in high school in Neoga, she had forty students. Eunice started as a music major at Millikin University in 1944, and to help pay her way through college she worked as a waitress, library assistant and conductor of church choirs. Starting her sophomore year she also taught a full class load in that school’s preparatory department. She graduated magna cum laude in 1948 with six music-related majors.
She married Decatur-native Ellsworth Dansby in Chicago on September 24, 1949, and the Decatur newspaper specified that the bride was white and the groom was a “negro.”
Deborah Dansby was born in Decatur on July 10, 1950. She began learning the piano at age 3, was in her first dance recital a month before age 5, started on the violin at 7, the clarinet at age 10, and began playing the viola at age 14. By eighth grade she was playing violin with the Millikin-Decatur Civic Orchestra. At Stephen Decatur High School she played violin in the orchestra and clarinet in the school band for two years before transferring to the famous Interlochen Arts Academy and graduating from there with honors in 1968. By 1973 she earned her B.A. and M.A. in music education and performance from the University of Michigan while also playing in the Toledo Symphony Orchestra. She then volunteered for the new arts program of the Peace Corps in Costa Rica, working with the youth orchestra and giving lessons while also playing with the National Symphony for a year before living, teaching, and freelancing in New York City from 1974 to 1977.
“Debbie” then became the director of the Shortridge Magnet School for the Performing Arts in Indianapolis. In August 1978 she married James Leland Still, the son of two public school music teachers. He was principal trombone and she the principal violist in the Marion, Indiana, symphony. They divorced in1983 and Deborah moved to Florida where she created the Fine Tuning Music Entertainment Agency as well as touring internationally with the acclaimed Mantovani Orchestra through 1988. She returned to Decatur in March 1988 as the guest viola soloist for the Millikin-Decatur Civic Orchestra. A few months later she married William Watson Wells, III in Orlando, and spent much of the next decade helping raise his son and two daughters. In 1993 she rejoined the Mantovani Orchestra as principal violist and tour manager until 2015.
Deborah has been a member and past officer of the Central Florida Musicians’ Union for more than forty years and was named a National Arts Associate of the Sigma Alpha Iota national music sorority in 2005. In 2025, at age seventy-five in Orlando, Deborah Dansby is a freelance ensemble performer, soloist, and clinician, while still having the energy to give private string lessons to more than a dozen students.
“Danny” Dansby was born in his grandparents’ house in Decatur on November 27, 1951. His father was working in Chicago and his mother Eunice waited too long before going to the hospital, so Dan was delivered by his uncle, John Goin Cheeks. Dan later attended Oakland Elementary School and Woodrow Wilson Jr High School. After five years of studying violin, he joined the Millikin-Decatur Civic Orchestra in the fall of 1964 while still in eighth grade. For three years at Stephen Decatur High School, he played the coronet in several bands and cello in the orchestra before graduating in 1969 from the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. After attending Parkland and Richland Community Colleges he worked in the records office of the Illinois National Guard in Springfield. On October 17, 1987 he married Patricia Ann Armstrong Gardner and moved to Athens, Illinois.
After graduation from the now University of Illinois-Springfield, he became office manager for the National Guard headquarters in the Illinois State Armory building until 2007. From 2008 to 2011 he worked for KBR as Document Control Manager throughout the Middle East supporting U.S. troops deployed in that region. Before retirement in 2019, he worked for five years in Central Illinois as a printer and computer technician for Compucom, while moving back to the Dansby family residence on Tuttle Street in Decatur where he resides today.
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