Word: edenton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Redford's off-duty hours and vacations turned into a blur of musty documents and marathon interviews of old people with tattered memories. The riddle of her origins, she discovered, lay in the North Carolina coastal plain around Edenton, Creswell and Columbia. Her research filled file drawers, boxes and shelves all over her house, and has finally been collected into a 350-page manuscript. What started as a digest of her own genealogy ended up being nothing less than a family tree of all the descendants of the slaves -- bearing 21 different surnames -- who once worked on one of North...
...idea that the family line led to the plantation. She was able to make the connection when she discovered a bill of sale in the Chowan County courthouse showing that her earliest known antecedent, Elsy Littlejohn, born in 1796, and eight children were sold by the Littlejohn plantation in Edenton to Josiah Collins, owner of Somerset. In the North Carolina state archives, she found a private collection of some 2,000 pages of letters, slave inventories, bills and memorandums from the Somerset plantation. How did the breakthroughs feel? Says Redford: "With the past opening up, you feel more complete...