One Last Detail

 

Exploring the court records of colonial Virginia in search of information on my fifth great-grandfather John Carter has been quite the education. The process opened my eyes to the business transactions and family matters of the well-to-do during that era of time. Wills, deeds, guardianship bonds, and other records provided the first glimpse of everyday events, at least at the crisis points of life. But in addition to discovering documentation to support the existence of a previously unrecognized wife of John Carter—Sarah Kenyon, mentioned in her father's will clearly as John's wife—there is one last detail before we close out this month's research, another aspect of life which needs to be examined.

My fellow genea-blogger Patrick Jones of Frequent Traveler Ancestry mentioned it to me as we exchanged notes regarding our discoveries this past month—and included his observations in at least two of his blog posts on the Carter line. The fact of the matter is that John Carter, along with the related families I examined—Kenyon, Chew, Beverley—owed much of their business success to the labor of enslaved workers.

It may not have been quite as evident, when examining John Carter's will, since he did not name any enslaved persons in that document, but the indication is there. Abraham Kenyon, John Carter's father-in-law, was more specific in his will, specifying a man named "Jerey" and a woman named "Jeney" to be given to his daughter Sarah, John's wife. Examining more records from Spotsylvania County where these ancestors lived would provide more details on names and identities—and, at some point, will be discovered to be the ancestors of other people now researching their roots.

Finding a way to share this information has been the thrust of several presentations and articles I've experienced over the years. I had first grappled with the question of "what to do" the same year I heard LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson make the call for genealogists to be a "force for social change" at the 2019 Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy.

I've since run across many suggestions for taking action to share information found in slave-holders' estate papers, the most recent being an article appearing in the online version of Family Tree Magazine, written by NGS Board member and genea-blogger Cheri Hudson Passey. Cheri advises: "Do something positive with the negative when finding out that your ancestors were enslavers." Indeed, she has posted documents and extracted information to share in several of her blog posts to help descendants of the enslaved find their roots.

One of the websites Cheri recommends for guidance in how to follow suit on this process is The Beyond Kin Project. Noting that the descendants of slaveholders are "uniquely positioned to revolutionize genealogy for [our] African American colleagues," Beyond Kin provides introductory explanations regarding the rationale behind the project, details research strategies, and how-to descriptions of the process of sharing the information we are finding on our ancestors. The project's goal is a collective effort to help each other find what we are all looking for: more information on our ancestors.

While finding specific names from the estate of John Carter will be somewhat of a challenge for me—I can't even find any records for one of his wives—I have done research regarding the formerly enslaved individuals from other parts of my family. Hopefully, that will provide one tiny clue to help other researchers advance their own quest to discover the stories of their family's past.

Following Up on a Note to Myself

 

After being astounded, thanks to the week-long course at SLIG in January, at all the resources available for those determined researchers intent on finding their African American roots prior to the Civil War, I couldn't lose sight of the fact that the very next month is designated African American History Month.

Though it may or may not be on account of that designation, it just so happened that during this past week, I was engaging in a little early spring cleaning, and came across a note I had written to myself a couple years ago, regarding the division of several slaves according to probate records after the passing of Sidney McClellan. At the time, I had been struggling to identify one of them—whom I later realized was named King Stockton—so once I had found my answer, I had set aside the rest of the names.

Fortunately, I didn't toss that handwritten note, but kept it in a pile to follow up on. Now that I've learned about some tendencies in record keeping, prior to that Civil War, I know it may be possible to assemble names into family groupings, a most helpful first step. But I also realize that every name on that list represents someone else's ancestor. And someone out there now may be looking for that information.

If I can, if it is at all possible, with the records I've already found, I might be able to reassess those groupings, extract theories about those family groupings, and then test the idea to see if there were, indeed, such families living in the area the McClellans once called home.

Perhaps that all seems like an assignment to find a genealogical needle in the family history haystack of humankind. But now that I've seen it done, I have been witness to the actual possibility. That alone is encouraging. After all, not until we believe we can achieve something will we attempt to do so.

Not that the task won't be challenging. Some of the techniques I learned during that week at SLIG were based on theories and hunches, and then pursued through documentation. Just having this list, gleaned from probate records, will give me a head start. I'm interested in seeing how things go as I try my hand at what the experts demonstrated during class. Experts have this way of making the nearly-impossible look so easy.

Full Brain, but no Hall Pass

 

Decades ago, cartoon enthusiasts looked forward to the single-panel daily dose of humor delivered up in Gary Larson's The Far Side. One specific cartoon comes to mind this weekend, as I recover from a week full of training at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy: the cartoon with a hapless student raising his hand and calling out, "May I be excused? My brain is full."

While my brain is indeed full—and churning away with an abundance of fresh ideas on approaches to research dilemmas—that doesn't mean I merit a hall pass to get out of class. I will certainly need this weekend to recoup energy and clarity before launching on a new research pathway for February. But the time has been a worthwhile investment. For anyone else struggling with the perplexing intricacies of researching the family history of African Americans, I wish you the gift of being able to hear such clarifying instruction.

I say intricacies, as exploring to the minutest fibers the contextual fabric of life in the South preceding the Civil War reveals a web in which even to become a freed slave meant being ensnared in not just social mores but laws and customs which severely restricted that supposed "freedom." No wonder there were actually petitions by some who were manumitted requesting return to slavery.

From what I gained in this past week's training, I'll formulate research goals regarding my pursuit of the details of King Stockton's life both growing up in Florida, and at the Georgia plantation where he was born in 1830. But this will no longer be a mere pursuit of who, what, where, or when. The why of it all needs to be incorporated into the full story of a family history, as well. Though my family has the benefit of an oral history regarding this man and his family, there is so much farther to go to delve into the full aspect of the history, both at the McClellan plantation in Wellborn, Florida, and back at the origin in the Tison plantation in Glynn County, Georgia.

And yet, that full brain needs some breathing room before expanding further. Yes, I'll review the videos of the class sessions once again—there were so many books recommended, I'll need to draw up my wish list, too—and make sure I haven't missed any research tips pertinent to this search for King Stockton's story. But to reflect is the final call from this week's proceedings. There is a great need to reflect on the meaning—the import—of the whole slave trade and what it meant to a nation's psyche, as well. Heady stuff, indeed.  

Little Theresa Comes of Age

When Job Tison died in 1824, his was not particularly the death of one of Glynn County's elders. He was fifty three. Not old but, arguably, not young, either—except that he left, upon his departure, a daughter who was not yet four years of age.

It was upon this daughter—Theresa Elizabeth—that the completion of one particular detail of her father's will awaited direction. Upon Theresa's arrival at the age of majority, one specifically named enslaved person—Mary Ann—was no longer to be permitted to remain "undivided" from "her future increase." Presumably, that meant Mary Ann, whoever she was, could now be separated from any of her children, and likely sold so that the complete distribution of the Tison estate could finally be accomplished.

For whatever reason, that action was not forthcoming from the executrix—Theresa's mother, now remarried and known as Sidnah Peck—which prompted Theresa to take the matter to court.

Theresa, by the point at which she attained the age of twenty one, was herself a married woman. Though I have yet to locate any documentation of the wedding, by 1841, Theresa had signed her petition to the Court of Ordinary as Theresa E. Mumford, and indicated within the petition that she had "intermarried" with one Sylvester Mumford. By December of that same year, she was to give birth to her oldest child, a daughter whom she named Ocenna. She—perhaps through the urging of her husband—may well have had reason to view her petition as "being to the interest of all the heirs of said estate."

Job Tison's probate file was filled with other indications that his executrix was not attending to business with any alacrity. Even after Sidnah Sheffield Tison Peck's death in 1855, it wasn't until 1859 that her son John Tison, assuming the role of administrator of the estate, finally petitioned the court for permission to sell, among other items, all the slaves still affiliated with the Job Tison estate.

Whether that list of enslaved individuals included Mary Ann—or her "increase," whoever that might have been—is yet to be seen. With so many pages of information on the estate—over thirty pages in Job Tison's file, plus the follow-up embedded in his son John Tison's own probate records—it will take a lot of bleary-eyed deciphering of handwritten documents to determine which was the final version of the many appraisals filed away in these records.

Above: Theresa Tison Mumford's signature, as affixed to her 1841 petition to the Court of Ordinary of Glynn County, Georgia, requesting final distribution of the personal estate of her deceased father, Job Tison; image courtesy Ancestry.com.


 

Excepting Mary Ann

As I work my way through the pages preserved in Job Tison's probate file in Glynn County, Georgia, I'm keeping my eye on any further wording echoing the Tison will's stipulation about "Mary Ann and her future increase," Whatever Job Tison meant by that wording, he wanted that to be "left undivided" until his youngest daughter came of age.

How hard it is for us, researching our ancestors from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, to understand the context in which such phrases are used. We certainly do not think in terms of the American culture of early 1800s southern life. The very thought of owning another person seems foreign to us—let alone any customary business arrangements linked to such a transaction.

Thus, we are left to our presumptions—unless someone from that time period had the foresight to spell it all out for us. Such gifts of cultural translation are rare.

I presumed that Mary Ann was a slave, considered property of the Tison estate. Thus, any child she was about to have would also become property of that same estate. That was the lot of the enslaved, generation after generation. I presumed that, for whatever reason, Job Tison did not want Mary Ann to be separated from the child she was about to have—as could well have happened, given the customary treatment of slaves about to be sold—and for whatever reason, he wished to grant this mother-to-be a reprieve for the seventeen years between the point of Job's death and his youngest daughter's twenty-first birthday.

My main question, therefore, was: what was so special about that child? And what made that child's mother so unique that she was singled out in the wording of the Tison will?

What is interesting about making presumptions is that one presumption can be as likely as another. Thus it was that reader Lisa posed the question, "Does that mean that the signers of the statements expected to share in the profits from a future sale" of Mary Ann and her "increase"? In other words, was Job Tison providing his heirs with investment guidance in his will?

A plausible explanation, just as reasonable as any assumption I might have made. Of course, the best way to arrive at the correct conclusion would be to examine the rest of the documents in the probate file—which will take quite a bit longer to do. Also, a thorough search for any supporting documentation—or, in its absence, contextual explanations provided through local illustrations of what was customary in that time and place for such circumstances—would be important.

All that will come in due time. However, though it is drawn from a different place (the state of Virginia) and a slightly earlier time period (the close of the 1700s), there is another example which prompts me to wonder about the Job Tison stipulation. It is the story of Thomas Jefferson and his liaison, well after the death of his wife, with the slave Sally Hemings.

The story, as I understand it through reading Jefferson's Daughters recently, is that Sally Hemings had been sent to accompany Jefferson's younger daughter across the Atlantic to live with Jefferson during the years he served as an American diplomat in Paris. While in France—a place in which slavery was not, technically, legal—Sally realized she could easily have left the Jefferson household, could have declared in court her intent to no longer be a slave, and the French court would have upheld her contention. Somehow, during those years in Paris, Jefferson may have already begun discussing a continuing relationship with Hemings, and in an agreement with her, persuaded her to return with him to Virginia, once his business in France was concluded.

In that agreement, among other details, Hemings had stipulated that each of her future children with him were to be freed upon their coming of age.

While the Hemings saga is not likely to be what Job Tison had in mind in his own will, the fact of such a relationship and agreement gives us an example of what certainly was an unusually cordial relationship between a slave-holder and the enslaved. While such stories are more likely to include violence, rape, and other deplorable mistreatments, there apparently were also some instances which included other arrangements. While I certainly have no resources pointing to such a possibility, there had to have been some reason for such a stipulation in the Tison will. I doubt it was there just because, on his deathbed, he felt like being nice. Mary Ann was not just some "lucky winner."

Then, too, I am aware that some of the slaves from the Tison plantation were counted, in future census enumerations, as mixed race. Specifically, they were commonly acknowledged to have "white" ancestry in their heritage. Where would that parentage have come from? We already know that Hester, the Tison slave bequeathed to Job's daughter Sidney, was considered biracial, as was her son, King Stockton. While Hester certainly wasn't singled out for any special mention in the Tison will, hers might have been, in the coming years after his death, a story similar to Mary Ann's.

All those thoughts, at this point, are merely presumptions. And one presumption is likely to be just as reasonable as any other. Who knows? Perhaps the tradition, back then, was to withhold sale of a slave until timing provided a better increase to the "investment." Perhaps, unlike either of our presumptions, there was another reason for the specific wording of the stipulation about Mary Ann. Perhaps we will someday uncover an explanation in the volume of papers in the Tison probate file. Or perhaps we will not.

Mary Ann

There was one peculiar clause inserted into the last will and testament of Job Tison of Glynn County, Georgia. After designating what was to become of all his property—as well as all his slaves, since he was a plantation owner—specifying how it should be divided up among his widow and their seven remaining children, plus the two grandchildren from his by-then deceased daughter, Job Tison added one final note. Based on the research experiences which have occurred since I began delving into my southern roots earlier this year at SLIG, seeing a note like this could only serve to make me wonder.

You see, the one slave—Hester—who went with Job's daughter Sidney as she, a newlywed as of September 25 of 1830, followed her husband George Edmund "McClelland" to a new residence in Wellborn, Florida, was apparently of a mixed race heritage. So was Hester's son, King Stockton, according to the 1870 census. Where did the "white" come from?

That very question was what propelled me, earlier this year, to seek out stories of similar situations, starting with what is perhaps the best-known of such histories, the saga of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. I am still in pursuit of the answer to my question about how widespread such tacit agreements actually were in the antebellum south. To be specific, I am wondering just whom Hester might have fingered as her father.

And here in Job Tison's will is a line which causes me to wonder once again. Of course, in this case, both Hester and Mary Ann, whoever she was, were by then adults, and there is no way to determine whether the two women were related to each other. But it was plain to see from the McClellan family's treatment of Hester that she held a privileged position within the ranks of that household's slaves. And now we see it was likewise, in the Tison family, for Mary Ann.

The wording in Job Tison's will put it thus:

My Negro Woman named Mary Ann and her future increase I wish left undivided until my youngest Child shall become of age.

Job's youngest child was Theresa Elizabeth Tison, born in September of 1820, less than four years before her father died. Waiting until Theresa became "of age" meant Mary Ann "and her increase" would remain as a family unit until at least late in the year 1841.

Indeed, the Tison family seemed intent upon keeping their father's will as the distributions were made from Job's estate. When oldest son Aaron received his portion in October, 1828, he signed a statement indicating he had received from his mother, executrix of the estate,

the sum of ten dollars in full of all demands against [the] estate of Job Tison Excepting of Mary Ann and her increase from eighteen hundred and twenty four.

Again, when his sister Melinda received her "full share" on May 25, 1830, her note likewise included that same wording "excepting" the required stipulation of "Mary an [sic] and her increase from the year of eighteen hundred and twenty four."

And so it went. Further on in the probate file for Job Tison came another such note, this time from the next daughter, Susan—by this point, a widow with an infant son of her own—dated October 17, 1830. Her receipt acknowledging her "full proportion" also included those same obligatory words about "Mary Ann and her increase."

As I work my way through each document filed in Job Tison's probate file, I'll likely uncover similarly-worded receipts from the rest of his children. And yet, as careful as each heir was to note the specific stipulation for Mary Ann and her "increase," not a word of explanation is provided for this unusual directive.

Or, to restate that more realistically, just as in Jefferson's case with Sally Hemings, there probably was a word of explanation going around among his neighbors and associates. It's just that no one was likely to write down such local gossip for the benefit of outsiders six generations later.

The Estate of Job Tison, Late

One thin sheet of paper, insufficient to prevent the ink from bleeding through to the other side, contained the three columns listing all the "several goods and chattel" belonging to the estate of Job Tison. It was drawn up and presented by the appointed appraisers to the court at Glynn County, Georgia, on October 25, 1824.

While there were plenty of entries for jugs, jars, pots, and even a waffle iron, the main point of interest—both for us and, apparently, for the appraisers, who gave this category top listing on the flimsy page—were the names and values of the persons once enslaved on the Tison plantation. Eighteen in all, their names were given as John, Jack, Sam, Harry, Jim, Rose, Caty, Mary, Mary Ann, Charlotte, Amy, Phoebe, Hannah, George, "Alick," Moses, Dick, and Anak.

None of those names in the inventory had appeared in Job Tison's will, which had called out specifically certain slaves intended for individual children. This, perhaps, provides an answer to my question yesterday about how many slaves in total Job had held. I tend to think—though not yet having made my way through the entire (and messy) probate file—that there might have been more slaves than were provided in this listing. Still, adding yesterday's thirteen names to the eighteen here, the total amounts to more than the twenty five slaves indicated in the 1820 census. Hopefully, the rest of the probate documentation will provide the missing names.

We can't, however, presume that all those named in this inventory were to be summarily sold. Some of those names I already recognize from other communications in the probate file. One, in particular, was mentioned repeatedly as each Tison child signed a note indicating receipt of his or her portion of the father's estate. That one slave was Mary Ann. Whether I can discern what the story was behind the particular care taken to remember Job Tison's request by calling her out in his will is yet to be seen, but that there was a story to be known is a hint too broad to ignore.

Getting Back to Job

It's been a long, winding trail since returning from my research trip to Florida last February. Since that point, a key focus has been the search for information on a book about the man I eventually learned was named King Stockton. More to the point, I wanted to find out more about his mother, though all I knew about her was that her name was Hester.

Hester and her infant son had moved from Glynn County, Georgia, along with my third great-grandmother, Sidney Tison, about the point at which Sidney married George McClellan. Finding an exact timeline for Hester is challenging, because we are talking about enslaved people deprived of not only their freedom but also the dignity of a full name and the expected types of documentation in which we could trace that name. But not only is any material on Hester or her son King—only known publicly by that full name after he became a freedman at the close of the Civil War—not available, I can find no record on the marriage record of the McClellans, either. Thus, at this point, I have no way to date their arrival in Florida from Georgia.

I can only presume that Hester and King came from the Tison property in Georgia—presume, that is, until I can sift through the long and messy probate file for Sidney's father's estate. Job Tison had died several years before his daughter Sidney married George and moved to Florida. At the point of Job Tison's death, he left only one son who had just that year attained legal age; all the rest of his seven children were still minors.

After Job's death in 1824, his widow—Sidnah, for whom daughter Sidney was named—was appointed executrix, but within eighteen months, she had remarried. For whatever reason—and I can understand the difficulty of such a situation—Sidnah did not move quickly on handling the financial matters related to the Job Tison estate, so that, at her own death, apparently intestate in 1855, her responsibilities fell the lot, as administrator, of her third son, John Mason Berrien Tison, by then an attorney, himself.

In the volume of handwritten receipts, appraisals, and other legal communications spanning the years from 1824 through the late 1850s in settling Job Tison's estate, there were several mentions of enslaved persons. These records, for the most part, provided only first names, though there were a few details about relationships and stipulations. In no part of the record—so far—can I find any mention of Hester, the African woman who accompanied Sidney Tison as she left her home to become the wife of George McClellan in Florida.

Still, this calls for a closer look at the record—and while we are in the process, we owe it to the possible descendants of those many named enslaved persons to record what can be noted on the ones whose names were provided. To make the process a little less confusing, we should also look at the players involved, and a bit of background history on Job Tison, his wife Sidnah, and the unexpected discovery of an earlier mention of a tie between the Tison family and the McClellans before the latter family moved from their original home in South Carolina to their new property in the territory of Florida in the 1820s. Perhaps in this second pass through the records, some more helpful details will surface to lead us to a reasonable explanation of Hester's situation before she left Georgia.

Back to Milling About

I've hit that spot again: what I've called—thanks to a cue from a sympathetic college professor during my sleep-deprived years pursuing a master's degree while working full time—the "milling about" stage of research. I'm stuck on my last project, but not quite ready to make a complete break and move on to a fresh assignment. So I find myself wandering in circles, looking for clues...any clues.

On the one hand, I've got several pages of end notes to plow through in the Jefferson's Daughters book, including some leads on further reading about my specific relational question about enslaved women and their too-amorous masters. I was thinking specifically of my situation in Florida, where my McClellan line settled, or possibly tracing the history back another generation to Georgia and my Tison line. Either way, all indications were that Sidney Tison McClellan's personal assistant Hester may well have been her relative; now, I need to figure out just how that might have been.

That's where a note in the Jefferson's Daughters book caught my eye. Specifically citing "prominent white Floridians," the book's author had traced that comment back to an entry in a book by Jane Landers entitled Black Society in Spanish Florida. But when I look at the reviews for that book, itself, the time period studied was during the Spanish colonial period—mostly, long before the time the McClellans settled in northern Florida. And looking further to other resources mentioned on that topic, they were mostly specific to 1700s Virginia, the era of Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings—too early and the wrong side of the region for my McClellan situation. Still, I may give a read to the suggested Joshua Rothman book on the Virginia examples, Notorious in the Neighborhood.

It's not so much the facts I'm after, but the attitude. I'm looking for the cultural mores. And that is hard to sift through, as much as I want to be able to comprehend—though certainly not agree with—the mindset of the era. Understanding the mindset helps a researcher follow the reasoning, the decisions, the subsequent events in the timeline of our ancestors' lives.

That sort of discovery doesn't come easily. It can't be forced. It certainly isn't something one can obtain instantaneously with a few keystrokes on a Google search. It only maybe comes by sifting through the lines, one by one—and then, reading very carefully between them to see what was left unspoken but most certainly still there to be discerned.

In the meantime, my mind is racing to decide on a next research step. Harvesting the research suggestions from a 425 page book doesn't occur quickly. The answer can be languishing on the far end of the universe of possible resources; while it's up to me to find it, I can't guarantee that quest will happen quickly.

And so, the question becomes: what's next? I believe there are two possibilities. One is to examine all the DNA match results that point to such a liaison, and compare notes on families to see whether there was, indeed, a McClellan or Tison connection. Another approach is to pursue more records on the Georgia side of the equation, starting with Sidney Tison's father.

Depending on which approach can be facilitated the quickest while reaching from a far distance—after all, I have no plans to fly to Georgia any time soon—will determine which course I can take next.

Off the Shelf: Jefferson's Daughters

Sometimes, the books I read aren't exactly volumes that have been languishing on my shelves for ages. There are times when I'm tempted to buy yet another book to add to my anti-library collection. For purely selfish reasons, this month's read was one of those instances.

I ran across a mention of Catherine Kerrison's year-old book just a couple months ago, as I was pondering the possibilities which connected me with a DNA match of African heritage. I was pretty sure I understood how that possibility existed, but my mind just couldn't get around the questions of how a culture could abide such an apparently widespread custom. Surely, I thought, there would be quite some domestic grief over the implications evident with such cases.

Of course, mine wouldn't be quite the scenario implicit in Jefferson's Daughters. I, for one, am not descended from an American president—certainly not one as eloquent as Thomas Jefferson. Nor were any of my ancestors educated in Paris while their father served on a diplomatic mission. Yet I needed to understand the views of the culture at that time concerning an apparently widespread issue: white enslavers fathering children with their enslaved women.

More to the point: what about the half-siblings? Did they each know about their relationship to the other side? How was that relationship perceived?

Obviously, answers to such questions will pull in a wide variety of examples. Every case was undoubtedly different—something I could already tell from informal discussions with other researchers dealing with the same relationship issues. Above all, I needed to be equipped to see the situations from the eyes of the culture in which these incidents occurred. Seeing that aspect of history in the American south from twenty first century eyes was not equipping me to apprehend the nuances of such relationships.

Kerrison's book—so far, as I'm not anywhere close to absorbing it all—has done a wonderful job of immersing me in the culture of the time, and unfolding the events, based on ample documentation. That, for one, will likely do my "just don't get it" twenty first century naivete some good. Not that I condone what had been done over two hundred years ago; I want to be able to comprehend how the relationships continued after the fact of behaviors we now find incredible.

To be specific, in my pursuit of the story of King Stockton and his mother, in reading between the lines in history's documentation of my McClellan family in northern Florida and my Tison family in coastal Georgia, it is quite likely that Hester, King's mother, chose her surname for more than just affinity with a mistress who greatly appreciated her. Hester may have been making a statement of just who she was related to—and not by marriage, but by descent.

As Kerrison delves into the cultural and psychological underpinnings of the Jefferson and Hemings story, it also informs me as to possible echoes in the south long after Jefferson's lifetime. Granted, I will need to follow up on this topic with much more than just one book, well written as it is. But take this as my first toe-dipping of the swimming season. I will eventually find myself immersed in the topic, and hopefully emerge from the plunge with a clearer understanding of not only Jefferson's family situation, but that of my own ancestors, as well.

The Dark Side of History

The strange disappearance of any mention of the names of the Stockton family in northern Florida, following the 1900 census, did have me stumped. When I went to the DNA conference last weekend, I took that question with me. At a point when I had a chance to talk with conference speaker Kenyatta Berry, I asked her that question. Why would all those people, from three different Stockton families, simultaneously disappear?

Admittedly, in researching family lines, we can run across tragedies spanning entire families. Florida being hurricane country, it isn't hard to imagine a poverty-stricken family seeing their home blown to bits in the gale force winds of such devastation of nature. Or consider the various epidemics occurring throughout our history, sometimes wiping out significant percentages of a town within a matter of months.

While such things do happen, there is another aspect that interjects itself into the history of the south—a darker side to history. While the end of the institution of slavery may have seemed a bright spot, it was followed by the politically unsuccessful Reconstruction era—along with, in its wake, subsequent rioting—and after that, the era of Jim Crow laws. Taking a quick read through the overview of historic events of those time periods can give a clear idea that the south was not a place to be if one looked like a former slave. Economic discrimination in the communities of the south was the least of an African-American family's problems.

When I asked Kenyatta Berry her opinion on why three of the families affiliated with King Stockton might have seemingly disappeared by the early 1900s, she had a few suggestions. First, of course, was that the family might have moved to the north. Better economic opportunity could come with such a move. Another variation on that theme was that the families might have moved from the country to urban areas within the same state, where there might be better offers of work.

The other possibility she mentioned was not as logically sterile. Could there have been a lynching in the area, she asked. While the time period might not have lined up with the dates when I saw the family seemingly scatter, I still had to answer in the affirmative. Yes, at one point, there had been such a tragedy. Perhaps that event was the tip of an iceberg of a societal chill factor, the impetus for the family to leave the area.

Coming to a conclusion on that research problem isn't easy. It could just be a matter of not finding the family mentioned in the records—another possibility I had considered. After all, what if enumerators—taking a head count for the precise reason of providing numbers determining representation in Congress—decided to slight the count for ulterior reasons?

All such conclusions can only be fed by a proper understanding of the context of the history of the time. Of course, it would be nice to find King Stockton's family names in the subsequent census records, but not being able to do so might be just the problem we need. It forces us to have to slow down and be alert to signals the historic narrative is sending us. We can't really understand our ancestors without understanding the times in which they lived. I'm hoping this detour sends us some strong signals to help pick up the story of what became of King Stockton's family.

Wide World of Resources

You would think, after reviewing all those online resources I've mentioned this week, that all those resources would be sufficient for discovering what we need to know about our King Stockton and his family.

Think again. There's more.

Hidden behind all those glittering online links where we can speed-click our way to easy answers, there is a more old-fashioned way to research the answers we seek. It's a way of books, but it is also a wide world of records behind the brick walls of traditional repositories. Every university, every archival collection, every private museum—and many other organizations, as well—is home to donated collections granted them by the rich and famous, as well as the lesser-known players in history. How to find these treasure troves is key.

I'm still struggling to make sense of how to find my way around this secret world of paper. Many of these collections keep their finding aids behind firewalls, inaccessible to the search engines of Google and other tech giants with prying eyes. Whether there is or isn't a biography on King Stockton—or any other the other members of his extended family—I really couldn't have known, if it weren't mentioned first as a footnote in a journal article, which led me (title of biography in hand) to the university which held that tiny item in its collection.

It's that process, repeated over and over again, that leads us to original sources that sometimes are the only way to find answers, particularly for issues of historical significance. But finding the key clue that leads to answers can be a challenge.

For what it's worth, here are a few of the ways I've found to crash through and find such gems.

Of course, the prime resource for background information on slavery in the United States would be the website of the National Archives. Here, for instance, I found this overview of civil records regarding the history of slavery. The list provides brief details on the record groups available, but doesn't, itself, offer up the actual documents. That, of course, would be yet another step in the process.

A similar repository would be the Library of Congress, which operates a free-of-charge cooperative cataloging program known as NUCMC (often pronounced "nuck-muck"). The acronym stands for the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, and the cataloging records it creates can be found on the Online Computer Library Center's networked libraries' database, WorldCat.

While that may be more than you ever wanted to know about finding stuff in libraries, that's the long explanation for how I found the King Stockton biography at the Rose Library at Emory University. Obviously, I now hope to find much more, especially in the way of background information on slavery, reconstruction, and the years of Jim Crow laws in the south. We can't just research the names, dates, and places of genealogy; sometimes, when we fail to find what we're seeking, we need to delve into the history behind the genealogy.

That, however, is only one way to access material available through libraries. Another resource is to look for keywords through the Digital Public Library of America, where lists like this one on slavery in the state of Florida can lead us toward more background information on our topic.

There is yet another world out there to research. I'm beginning to uncover information on repositories which seem unconnected from each other. Most of these, I stumbled upon, thanks to Cyndi's List. There is, for instance, a list of finding aids on African American genealogy posted at the online library system of Florida Atlantic University. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro hosts the searchable Digital Library on American Slavery. In Austin, the University of Texas Briscoe Center for American History provides a searchable online resource where I found several pages of results about slavery.

If these three unrelated universities have searchable collections, there are surely others—universities, museums, archives, and other repositories. To discover each possibility—and then search through their holdings—would take an enormous investment in time. That's why it was encouraging to hear, in Kenyatta Berry's presentations at the Family Tree DNA conference I attended last weekend, that a committee is forming to discuss ways to network the many collections related to the slavery issue in America—a one-stop-shopping approach to allowing researchers to uncover the universe of possibilities as they tackle the historical questions in their niche specialty of this broad topic.

There are more lists and resources than one could imagine. Take, for instance, this website which I never had heard of before. I think I found it thanks to Cyndi's List, but at this point, I have forgotten what led me to their digital door. But searching their wiki for broad categories, I found this list for information on plantations in Florida, and another list for Georgia, as well. Clicking through to each sub-topic in the lists revealed more resources.

Yet another set of resources, as I clicked through from website to website, turns out to be sites devoted to urging participants to share what they have found. One site in particular, The Beyond Kin Project, urges descendants of slaveholders to share what records their ancestors might have kept which reveal identities of enslaved persons. Their website also includes a list of other helpful web pages related to this issue, such as the website, Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery.

With all the resources I've mentioned so far this week, it would seem it is enough information to fill a Ph.D.'s course of study in the American history of slavery. And yet, I am quite sure this is just the tip of the iceberg of all available records out there to access. Knowing how to find such stuff is just the first step. Then you have to read it, absorb it, analyze it, and synthesize it.

Just listing all these possibilities has even exhausted me! Sometimes, when that feeling of chasing myself in circles descends upon me, I find I need to set aside a research project for a while. I've been poking at it from every angle I can think of, and yet, I'm not gaining any advantage. It may be time to do some background reading, and then come at the issue with fresh eyes after a few days' respite. 

The History of "Now"

Sometimes, an innovation is so new that, in our eagerness to try that something new, we forget to watch its progress as it unfolds. Before we know it, that "new" thing has been tried and loved for a year, five years, a decade, a quarter century—before we realize the time has flown by and "new" has become traditional. In its newness, we forgot to track its history.

That may well have been what happened when we saw the launch of innovative genealogical websites with the advent of the Internet. We were so in love with searching through digitized documents that we forgot to notice the passage of time—and how our new toy was evolving with the years.

Such was the case with one search resource many of us may have tried—which, although it has passed twenty five years of service, is still around to be used. That genealogical resource is the website known as Rootsweb. First launched by Brian Leverich and Karen Isaacson in 1993 as the Roots Surname List, it continues to bill itself as "the oldest free online community genealogy research website."

The website became the place for people to freely share their family trees, distribute information to free subscriber-based message lists based on surnames or geographic locations, and find pages filled with a potpourri of information of interest to genealogists. The US GenWeb projects were hosted on the website for free, as were several websites of local genealogical societies.

As you can imagine, too much of a good thing eventually became exactly that: too much. To keep up with costs—and thus not lose a monumental pile of genealogically-significant details—the site (and, of course, its expenses) was eventually taken over by the parent company of Ancestry.com in June, 2000.

From that point, other than the addition of advertising for Ancestry-related offerings, the website continued to operate much the same as it always had; disaster averted. However, in the latter part of 2017, a security breach was discovered, causing host company Ancestry.com to have to shut down Rootsweb "temporarily." Only recently has the content of the original Rootsweb been brought back online, gradually, and in segments. Some of those portions have, in the interim, been redesigned.

So how does a website like Rootsweb help someone like me in my research quandary about finding King Stockton and his freedmen relatives? The reconstituted Rootsweb still provides a searchable array of family trees containing over six million surnames. One of those trees just happens to be for our King Stockton. While the tree has not been updated recently, it does provide some information on another researcher's path of discovery, and includes a way to contact that submitter.

Rootsweb is not only for freely exploring other people's trees. The website includes resources to find and search over thirty thousand genealogical mailing lists kept since the website's inception—decades of searchable conversations about researching surnames and localities—as well as the other sites it hosts. And while Rootsweb's wiki seems pretty puny, it does include a brief entry for the county in question for our quest to uncover more information on King Stockton.

It may come as no surprise that the computer wiz who created Rootsweb didn't stop at the passing of that website into corporate hands. And that is the next list of lists I want to mention in this catalog of other places that might help us learn more about what become of King Stockton. The new website is called Linkpendium, and as its "About" page explains, its goal is to index every genealogy-related website on the Internet.

Indeed, pulling up a list of what Linkpendium had for the entry "Suwannee County, Florida" showed a multi-faceted spread of options. Of course, some of those results are for websites we've already explored—Rootsweb, Cyndi's List, or FamilySearch.org. But there were also new-to-me resources which I could now use to push the knowledge envelope a little farther out. I can also repeat this search process on Linkpendium for broader topics related to slavery or freedmen or life in the specific states of Georgia or Florida.

Beyond such lists of lists as Linkpendium, or the resources hosted on Rootsweb, or even Cyndi's List, there are other online stops to make in seeking to get a broader understanding of what happened, say, during the Civil War follow-up era of Reconstruction, or at the onset of Jim Crow laws. There are a few other possibilities I'd like to mention tomorrow, as well as news I discovered about projects to bring the less accessible items such as letters, diaries, and other manuscript-format records to the forefront in a search like the one we've launched in pursuit of the Stockton family.

Those Lists of Lists

There are people in my beginning genealogy classes who groan at the prospect of actually finding anything on Cyndi's List. Why? Not because it's a skimpy overview of the universe of genealogy. Quite the opposite: it's immense. If it seems hopeless to find a needle in a haystack, just enlarge that haystack exponentially to get the feel of what a search on Cyndi's List feels like to some people.

But we are not "some people." We are fearless researchers.

Right?

Hello?

I've been using Cyndi's List for, well, it seems like decades. And to say that is nearly correct. Cyndi's list of lists started out in 1995 when owner Cyndi Howells put together a short list of genealogy links from her Internet explorations and presented it to her local genealogical society. That list grew—and grew, and grew—from there. Now, there are upwards of 332,000 links spanning over two hundred genealogical research categories contained at www.cyndislist.com.

So, how does something as sprawling as that website help someone like me find what I need to know about the background of the slavery experience King Stockton and his family might have endured? Here's an illustration of the different ways we can configure a search on this topic. If I want to see what links Cyndi's List has found for the subheading of slavery under the heading of African-American, I get a page full of links. I can look through that list of links, and if any one of them looks like information I might want to pursue further, I simply click on that link.

If I alter my search terms only slightly—let's say, to Slavery with a subheading of United States—I would get another set of links to explore. Or if I wanted to explore the topic by regions, I could enter yet another set of search terms—say, African-American and Locality Specific—and explore yet another universe of possible resources.

Admittedly, it must be hard for a one-woman-show like Cyndi's List to keep up with ever-changing URLs and other disruptions in cyberspace. While Cyndi asks her faithful followers to help by reporting broken links, every now and then, a click does not return its hoped-for destination. When that happens, I use the target site's root address and then try to search for the subheading through that website's own directory.

Cyndi's List is not the only list of genealogical resources, though. There are, of course, others. Why else would I tell you we'd take a tour through the possibilities over the next few days? There are other ways to find what we are seeking about the context of slavery in the American south during the life of our King Stockton and his family. We'll check out a few more, tomorrow. 

Where to Look When You Don't Know Where to Look

The Internet is an indomitable frontier, a wild and woolly—and ever expanding—universe of knowledge. The only hope of ever taming it comes by arming one's self with finding aids. Search engines, for one, will help locate the answers we seek—but may serve us either for better or for worse, depending on our judicious choice of wording. Beyond that skill of framing the question—and then re-framing it, again and again—much like for archives and other analog repositories, there are finding aids.

For genealogy, several such devices come to mind. There are wikis devoted to such service—for instance, the one I've heard much about this past weekend at a DNA conference: the ISOGG Wiki.

For our intents, stuck as we are in the search for information on the family of one King Stockton of Glynn County, Georgia, and eventually, the northern Florida counties of Suwannee and Saint Johns, we need more generic search help—finding aids that will bring us closer to resources which speak of African Americans in the mid-1800s through the next hundred years.

When, last Friday, reader Lisa mentioned she was "watching to see where else" I would look, stuck as I am with the search for King Stockton, I thought that might be a good idea for a next post. After all, I am the genealogical guinea pig, and this blog is the unfolding of my discoveries (or flounderings) as they occur.

Sometimes, it is easy to assume that everyone else knows what we know. And so, thinking that, we naturally neglect to say it out loud—missing by that very assumption the chance to pass along a tip that might be helpful. Though it may be redundant for others stuck in the same search quandary, at the risk of repeating the obvious, I'd like to take the next few days to backtrack and mention some of the go-to places I've found useful when I'm stuck or wandering around in that daze or malaise of not knowing where to go next.

First, the other wikis. Just like Wikipedia for general knowledge—or specific places like the ISOGG Wiki for questions about genetic genealogy—there are other wikis devoted to genealogy. Primary among them is the FamilySearch wiki. A resource like that, though, can be so immense as to render a search a formidable task. I prefer to enter the FamilySearch wiki through the side door of a Google search, in which I first enter the website name in quotes—"FamilySearch wiki"—and then follow that with the term I'm actually seeking. If that term contains more than one word, I may also delineate that set of words in its own quote marks, as well—"FamilySearch wiki" "American slavery"—before I hit "enter."

Even a search as direct as that brings up multiple choices. Exploring a wiki like this can take hours, depending on how persistent you are. In pulling up such a search, I found there were multiple entries for slavery in general, slavery by country, and then—finally—results concerning African American slavery entries.

Many of the FamilySearch wikis provide background information on the topic being searched, providing a handy context for the material I'm after. Cutting to the chase of the links to get me those coveted genealogical answers may not be the wisest strategy, despite that strong desire to find the "answer" to my quest. Sometimes understanding the backstory can better inform the search from the start.

However, the FamilySearch wiki does provide handy lists of links, too. First, they provide "Quick Guides"—think of these as wiki-lite—which organize the links around brief descriptions of context; one link, for instance, leads you straight to a quick guide to general resources on African American genealogical research.

Some of the pages found while searching the FamilySearch wiki may seem to be redundant, but don't lose patience over that repetition. On this generic page about African American resources, I spotted the statistic that only about fifteen percent of enslaved persons adopted the surname of their most recent master, and while some took the name of an admired historical figure—George Washington or Abraham Lincoln come to mind here—others officially assumed a surname they had been using for years, even if the slave owner had never had any knowledge of that name.

Other pages found under that same generic topic on the FamilySearch wiki—on African American slavery—get right to the point with a list of links on the topic. While many of those links lead to federal records—such as the slave schedules in census records, even to specific census years—another approach is to drill down to the state level, finding, for instance, separate wikis for such resources for the state of Florida.

If that isn't enough material to get a researcher started—Kenyatta Berry recommended, at the conference I attended last weekend, constructing a spread sheet just for comparing facts found in the 1850 slave schedules in comparison with those recorded in the 1860 census—there are, of course, other finding aids to help us seek our research answers, too. Those, however, I'll save for tomorrow. And maybe the day after, as well. There are a lot of ways to find the answers we seek, provided the answers are out there in the ether to begin with.

    

A Weekend Detour that Hit Home

Every year, I make sure to attend one special conference in Houston. It is a small event for whom only a few—well, especially in comparison to blow-out events like RootsTech—gather. To become part of this gathering, one first needs to serve as a volunteer project administrator for the various citizen-scientist pursuits of genetic genealogy—there are now over ten thousand of them—hosted under the auspices of Family Tree DNA. Upon achieving such a role, then one must be sure to sit at the computer, ready for the split second that registration for the conference opens. This is an event that fills up its limited space quickly.

I look forward to attending this FTDNA project administrator's conference every year. There are always fascinating speakers, and the smaller venue allows for great networking as well as opportunities to speak with others working on similar goals. Just last night, for instance, I had the opportunity to talk with Dana Leeds, originator of the color clustering method to sort DNA matches, now generally referred to as the Leeds Method. Just in time for the DNA class I will be teaching next month for a local organization, she mentioned to me that a genealogist in New Zealand—Fiona Brooker of Memories in Time—had introduced a paper version of Dana's spreadsheet-based method, which I believe my class will find a more comfortable match to their learning style.

Ever since my Southern Research Techniques class at SLIG last January, as you know, I have been engrossed with the research project of finding the biography—and, thus, the life details—of a former slave on the McClellan plantation of my third great-grandfather. But this weekend, I figured I would be setting aside my work on that goal to focus on a different subject: that of genetic genealogy.

As it turns out, that may not be entirely so; one of the featured speakers at today's event will be Kenyatta Berry, expert on researching African roots, keynote speaker at RootsTech 2017, who is mostly known for her work on the PBS program, Genealogy Roadshow.

It is one thing to hear Kenyatta at RootsTech, jostling the crowds with tens of thousands of other participants. It is quite a different experience to walk into a pre-conference reception and realize the comparative increase in accessibility in the more intimate venue of a gathering numbering only two hundred people. I'd love to have a chance to run King Stockton's story by her, and benefit from her take on historical pressures which may be keeping me from locating any of the usual records researchers are accustomed to locating in pursuit of their family's roots.

This afternoon, Kenyatta will be discussing "My DNA Journey: African and European Roots." Perhaps her story will be similar to the one I heard at SLIG last January, when LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson revealed her cross-racial DNA discovery in her presentation at the Monday night colloquiam—the presentation which encouraged me to delve into the story of King Stockton.

There may still be some in the genealogical world who believe there are two camps in family history: those who trust the paper trail, and those who see value in the DNA record. Sometimes, listening to discussion, one could come away thinking there is an either/or dichotomy, as if it is simply adequate to solely research familial ties based on what can be found documented in records. There is more than meets the eye, however—which, in the case of King Stockton, his "mulatto" mother Hester, and their descendants, is obviously true—and such cases may never find a written record of what happened in those people's history. The tools of genetic genealogy, while perhaps not providing a complete answer, can at least lead the way to possible alternative explanations, ones that might not otherwise have been considered.   

A Sideways Maneuver

Sometimes, I just need to take my own advice. Lately, I've been feeling like I'm chasing myself in circles, as far as researching the Stockton family goes. I'm already working on the lines of each of King and Louvenia Stockton's children—and seeing how different the result from actual documents is turning out to be, compared to my reference points from King Stockton's biography. But in a way, I'm still stuck. Perhaps the best thing to do now is see if I can make an end run around the brick wall of 1865 by searching for details on any of King Stockton's possible siblings.

There is one candidate I can spot right away, taken from the 1870 census: another family on the same page as King Stockton in Wellborn, Florida. Much too old to be a child of King and Louvenia—unlike Albert Stockton, who also appeared on the same page of that enumeration—this man could possibly be a brother. But I don't know yet.

It makes sense to follow what I can find on this other Stockton entry for a few reasons. First is the proximity to King Stockton's house. Second, though not necessarily as strong a factor, is the detail that this Stockton man, one year younger than King, was not born in Georgia as King was, but in Florida; this would have been the case for any possible younger siblings of King, as he and his mother were moved from Georgia within the year after his birth.

More intriguing, though, is the fact that this Stockton man happened to name one of his daughters Hester—the name of King's mother.

This Stockton man's name—at least according to the 1870 census—was listed as Francis Stockton. His age, given in the census, was thirty nine, putting his year of birth at approximately 1831. If, in the thinking of the antebellum South, Francis was born to King's mother Hester, then he, too, would likely have been a slave on the McClellan property. Yet in the probate records found after Sidney McClellan's death—providing the listing that included both King and his mother Hester—there was no Francis mentioned.

But there was a Frank. Could Frank have been Francis Stockton? Could he have been another son of Hester and perhaps a brother—or at least half-brother—of King Stockton? I had to take a look to see what I could find about this other possible branch of the Stockton family.

Making the Overwhelming Searchable

The Freedmen's Bureau—officially known, at the time of its formation, as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—was originally an agency of the United States Department of War set up to help those "destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen" in the aftermath of the Civil War. While that mission encompassed providing assistance for not only the former slaves but also displaced and impoverished whites in the South, the original intent soon refocused on the burgeoning needs created as the freedmen attempted adapting to a new life.

Within the agency's jurisdiction came such responsibilities as relief efforts, education, health care, employment issues, and pension provisions for soldiers and sailors. Of most importance—at least to us as researchers of family history—was expansion of the Bureau's efforts to help African Americans locate family members from whom they had become separated during the war.

While we may not be able to fully comprehend the level of upheaval encountered in southern quarters after the Civil War, what we can appreciate is the amount of paperwork generated in such an endeavor. The wide variety of records amassed by such a far-reaching jurisdiction over the course of its operation from 1865 through 1872 can yield family historians and others a gold mine of information—if we are able to search through the overwhelming volume of records. Search is the key.

As it turns out, there are several resources for delving into the depth of the Freedmen's Bureau records. Primary among them is the federal repository for all United States governmental records, the National Archives and Records Administration. Not only did the National Archives collect the federal records, but recall that much of the Freedmen's Bureau was focused on work through field offices in various southern states. That set of records, as well, are microfilmed and available through NARA.

But...microfilm. Hardly an expeditious way to hone in on the surnames we are seeking in this online research era. We have learned to expect faster and cleaner work with accurate results. We have been spoiled by Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org.

Fortunately, The Freedmen's Bureau Project has taken on that challenge. A collaborative effort between FamilySearch International, the National Archives, the Smithsonian, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society and the California African American Museum, the main names in the records have been indexed.

Indexing, however, is just a start. The Freedmen's Bureau Transcription Project seeks to transcribe, word for word, every single document, yielding a keyword-searchable collection. The National Museum of African American History and Culture has partnered with the Smithsonian's Transcription Center to launch the "largest crowdsourcing initiative ever sponsored by the Smithsonian." While several projects are close to completion, several are still only thirty six percent complete—or much less. These sites are actively recruiting more volunteers willing to help complete the task.

As the results are made available—the roll out, in its completion, is scheduled to be released in two phases—we will begin to experience the yield of a complete search process. In the meantime, I tried my hand at one website to see if I could find anything on our King Stockton or his family in Florida—just in case Hester McClellan wanted to locate King's father back in Georgia. While the results didn't lead me to what I had hoped for, it did reveal some surprising information.

Finding Stories Like King's

To research the stories of post-Civil War freedmen like King Stockton, I first went to my go-to website for genealogical orientation: the wiki at FamilySearch.org. Just entering the term "slave" brought up a widespread list that was more than adequate for starting such research. In fact, it was overwhelming.

One reason I had chosen such a generic term for that wiki search was that I wanted to locate an online resource for the Slave Narratives that was searchable. I already knew about the Work Projects Administration's Federal Writers' Project—actually entitled Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 - 1938—but in the way it is set out at the Library of Congress, the best I could find was a description of each volume plus an entry stating "includes narratives by." Even though the Florida volume included interviews conducted in Live Oak, Lake City, and Monticello—towns in the vicinity of the McClellan plantation on which King Stockton and his family were once enslaved—the listing of people participating was long, and not particularly in alphabetical order.

Looking through the Georgia volume including the part of the alphabet which would include the Stockton family did not pinpoint any stories by Stocktons or about McClellans. Did that comment, "includes narratives by" imply that there were others besides those names listed? It could be a tedious task—though doubtless informative in a general manner—to read through each volume in search of those two surnames.

Trusting that other online repositories such as Internet Archive prided themselves on digitizing everything about everyone—at least if the material was now in the public domain—I googled the Slave Narratives title to see where else I could find the volumes. Sure enough, I found the answer: Project Gutenberg, hosted by Internet Archives.

The best answer, if I wanted a searchable resource for their file of The Slave Narratives, would be to download the material and then search through it on my own computer. The downside to that brilliant deduction is there are a lot of files from The Slave Narratives. Besides, the dates of the narratives—1936 through 1938—meant they post-dated our King Stockton's life span, as he died in 1929.

So...I backpedaled and went in search of another major resource I knew of. Perhaps this one would allow me to search by name through its digitized images. There is so much data out there, but finding the right details is the key. Without search, it's a slog. 

Searching for the Searchers

If you can't find the family you are searching for, perhaps you can join the other people searching for the family you are searching for. That, of course, has been the operative theory behind those pre-Internet queries printed in genealogical society newsletters of the 1900s, and, more recently, the burgeoning online genealogy forums and Facebook groups. But even before that, people have put their collective muscle together through networks to help them find their missing relatives and friends.

Similar to what the Irish did in seeking their missing immigrant relatives through the Boston Pilot newspaper's column "Missing Friends" from 1831 through 1921—now a searchable database at Ancestry.com as well as published in a multi-volume set—former slaves sought to locate their missing relatives through letters published in southern newspapers. And, like the Boston College project to preserve the "Missing Friends" columns, one project launched by the graduate students of the history department at Villanova University is working to do the same with the wide variety of newspaper ads placed by former slaves in search of their family members.

Called "Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery," the searchable website enables genealogists and other researchers to see for themselves the pleas for help in reconnecting family groups torn apart by slavery. I first learned about this data collection through a lecture presented by genealogist Tony Burroughs at the 2018 conference of the Federation of Genealogical Societies in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Since I knew I would be launching this research project about the unnamed former slave associated with my mother's McClellan family, I thought this could possibly be a useful resource for my quest. Even if it didn't resolve my research problem—it couldn't, at the time, as I didn't even know the man's name—the collection, which is browsable, was an excellent tutorial on the plight of such families, post-civil war.

If nothing else, I hoped it would lead me to any information on just what became of the rest of King Stockton's family. For one thing, his namesake father had never shown up in any records I could find, other than as a mention in King Stockton's biography. Then, even though we know his mother, Hester McClellan, had been sent from Glynn County, Georgia, to Wellborn, Florida, there was still the question about what happened to her following the civil war. And in the bigger picture, surely there were siblings of King Stockton; where did they end up after the war?

With that, it's time to launch out into the general resources available online for those seeking their ancestors among the emancipated slaves of the 1870s and beyond.