Putting theory into practice, last night, I sat down and wrote a Research Plan for tracking possible slave-owners for my 3rd great-grandmother, Mariah Wimberly McNair. I have suspicions, but I’m now trying to follow-up on those suspicions. It starts with listing all the Wimberly’s that I could locate in 1870 in Edgecombe County (and I have found one so far in the neighboring Nash County). In that list, I have only three white Wimberly families and fortunately, they are the only ones in the area and held between them, close to 100 slaves.
After documenting several aspects, I then selected a few books that I wanted to look at more closely at the State Archives. While the TN archives does not have nearly as much NC info as I’d like, they do have a substantial collection and I am home this afternoon with a whole stack of photocopies to go through more extensively! I’ll post specifics later.
And, while I was there, I met a lady (and her mother) who had emailed me just two days ago in response to some information she found about an ancestor that I had posted in my Nashville Globe Blog. Must have been predestined for us to meet!