Karla Trotman, Ambler resident and president and CEO of Electro Soft Inc., an electronics manufacturing and engineering firm in Montgomeryville that her parents started, never learned about James Forten in school growing up.

Little did she know that she would have such a strong familial connection to the prominent Black Philadelphia businessman and abolitionist.

Forten played an important role in the abolitionist movement in the 1800s. And it turns out that Trotman’s husband’s family is related to him, writes Valerie Russ for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Forten, a sail-loft company owner, was the wealthiest Black man in Philadelphia in the 1800s.

Trotman, a board member of the Museum of the American Revolution and co-chair of the museum’s Black Founders exhibition committee, discovered the familial connection while working on the exhibition: “Black Founders: The Forten Family of Philadelphia.”      

Forten, born free in Philadelphia in 1766, served on an American privateer ship during the Revolutionary War.

After the war, he worked at and eventually owned a sail-loft company in Philadelphia.

As a business owner, he employed both Black and white workers and used his wealth and prominence to support abolitionist causes.

The familial connection is through his granddaughter Charlotte L. Forten.

Read more about James Forten and his connection to Ambler’s Karla Trotman in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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