I know that sounds strange considering this entire newsletter exists because of old records and dead people.

But if I’m honest...

I was looking for an anchor.

I didn’t have a church that felt like home. I didn’t have a pastor whose words made everything make sense. What I had was gospel music that could still bring me to tears, a handful of Bible stories I remembered from childhood, and this curiosity I couldn’t shake about the spiritual world my ancestors knew before slavery demanded they become someone else.

I wasn’t trying to choose between Christianity and African spirituality.

I was trying to understand where I belonged.

And somehow...

that search led me to old census records.

To probate files.

To church registers.

To Martha.

When I first started researching my family, I thought I knew what I was looking for.

I wanted to find the hero.

The Harriet Tubman of my family.

The Nat Turner.

The person who looked evil in the eyes and decided, “Not me.”

The one history couldn’t ignore.

The one who would explain why I am the way I am.

Every new record felt like I was getting closer.

Every name made me wonder...

Is this the one?

Then one night, sitting on the edge of my bed with the television playing in the background, I opened a probate file. Not the summary. The whole thing.

Page after page. Then I saw it. “To Arete...”

And underneath were names.

Levi.

Martha.

John.

Edmund.

Sarah.

Spencer.

For a second, my heart forgot how to beat. Not because I had finally broken through the 1870 wall. Because I realized these weren’t just names anymore.

These were my people.

I cried.

Not because I had solved the mystery.

Because I suddenly understood how much of it had been stolen.

The records tell me who owned Martha.

They don’t tell me who Martha was. And it couldn’t have been just this.

It couldn’t have just been bondage...

and then freedom.

There had to be laughter somewhere.

She had to have rolled her eyes at somebody.

She had to have had a favorite meal.

She had to have loved somebody enough that losing them nearly broke her.

Did she sing?

Did she dance?

Did she pray?

Did she ever get angry with God?

Did she whisper dreams she knew were impossible?

A life cannot fit inside a probate file.

It just can’t.

For the longest time, I thought courage looked like Nat Turner.

Loud.

Unmistakable.

History-changing.

Maybe that’s because those are the stories we’re taught to celebrate.

But somewhere along this journey, I started wondering if courage sometimes looks quieter than that.

What if courage looked like waking up one more morning?

What if it looked like protecting your children when you couldn’t protect yourself?

What if it looked like remembering names when the world was trying to erase them?

What if surviving was its own revolution?

Because if Martha hadn’t survived...

I don’t exist.

That realization has been sitting heavy on my heart.

I can’t tell you exactly when it happened.

Maybe it was after finding Spencer.

Maybe it was after reading that probate record for the tenth time.

Maybe it was when I caught myself saying her name out loud.

But one day Martha stopped being an enslaved woman in my research notes.

She became my ancestor.

That feels different.

Ancestor isn’t just someone you descend from.

I used to think I was searching for the hero of my family.

And damn it...

I found her.

She just didn’t look the way I expected.

She wasn’t standing in front of an army.

She wasn’t leading a revolt.

She wasn’t becoming famous.

On paper, she looked ordinary.

Just another woman listed among property.

But paper has a way of lying by omission.

The paper doesn’t tell me how many times she chose hope over despair.

It doesn’t tell me how she mothered.

How she loved.

How she survived.

How she carried enough life inside of her that, generations later, one of her descendants would sit on the edge of a bed and cry because she finally found her.

Maybe that’s the inheritance she left me.

Not land.

Not wealth.

Not even stories.

The reminder that survival is not ordinary.

It never was.

I still don’t know what Martha’s voice sounded like.

I don’t know if she laughed loudly or softly.

I don’t know what she prayed when no one else was listening.

I don’t know what freedom felt like the first morning she woke up and realized no one could sell her again.

I may never know those things.

But I do know this.

The day I found Martha, I thought I had discovered another enslaved woman in my family tree.

I was wrong.

I had found my ancestor.

And somehow...

that changed me.

I had already found the probate records for Wood T. Johnson on Ancestry, but FamilySearch allowed me to look through the entire file. So I was scrolling, zooming in, trying to make sense of the handwriting and looking for anything that might take me beyond 1870.

Then I saw it.

“To Arete, the following slaves…”

Levi.

Martha.

John.

Edmund.

Sarah.

Spencer.

And others.

My heart skipped.

The only thing I could think about was one of those moments on Finding Your Roots when somebody uncovers something so profound that the whole room changes.

Except there was no Henry Louis Gates Jr. sitting across from me.

There was no camera.

There was just me, sitting on my bed, staring at my phone and realizing that I had broken through the 1870 wall.

I saw Martha first. Her name was so clear.

Then I saw Spencer.

Then John and Edmund.

I was excited. Shocked. I could not believe it, but at the same time, I knew exactly what I was seeing.

The census records proved me right.

I had found them.

I Had to Search Sideways

Before I found this probate, I did not have a neat trail leading me directly to Martha.

I had to search sideways.

I knew Martha’s name because she was listed as the mother of my great-great-grandfather, Spencer Johnson, on his marriage certificate. I had an estimated year of birth based on the census records, and those dates told me that both Martha and Spencer had been born during enslavement.

That was about it.

There was no birth certificate for Spencer waiting on me. No record that said, “Here is Martha. Here are her parents. Here is where she came from.”

Just pieces.

I found Spencer in the 1880 census as the head of his own household. He was there with his wife and child, but he was also caring for his mother and his brothers.

That caught my attention.

Here was a man who had been born enslaved, now leading a household of his own. He was taking care of the family he was building and the family he came from at the same time.

Then I went back ten years.

In 1870, Martha was the head of the household.

No husband.

No adult man.

Just Martha and three boys.

John, Edmund, and Robert.

I kept looking at that record and asking myself, “How?”

How did she do it?

What was she saying to herself during those first few years of freedom?

How did she feed them?

How did she protect them?

What did she do when she was afraid?

And listen, I am not male-centered. I do not believe a woman’s strength depends on whether a man is standing beside her.

But baby, during that time, having no man in the household came with baggage. Economic baggage. Social baggage. Safety concerns. She was a formerly enslaved Black woman raising boys in a country that had only recently stopped recognizing her as someone’s property.

So even before I found the probate, I saw resilience in her.

The pieces were just lightly scattered across the table, but I could see that they fit.

Then I found the probate, and a hole in the plot was filled.

She Held On to Her Boys

When I saw Martha’s name in that probate record, I was not just finding evidence that she had been enslaved.

I was seeing a timeline.

In 1862, Wood T. Johnson died, and the people he enslaved were divided among his heirs.

Martha and the people listed alongside her were passed to his daughter, Arete Johnson Yarborough.

Spencer was about fifteen years old.

That part stays with me.

Martha was being passed from one enslaver to another, and her children were there with her.

I do not really see the census and the probate as a contrast. To me, they are connected.

The probate showed me where she came from.

The census showed me what she became.

And what I kept coming back to was this:

She held on to her boys.

We know the stories of enslaved women whose children were sold away from them. We know that families could be separated because an enslaver died, because a debt needed to be paid, or because somebody simply decided to sell a child.

Mothers had no legal power to stop it.

But somehow, Martha held on to her boys.

Spencer was there.

John was there.

Edmund was there.

Years later, John and Edmund were still living with her.

Then, by 1880, Spencer had his mother and his brothers living in his household.

They were still together.

Maaaan.

Resilience.

That is what I felt.

She held on to them through slavery, through the death of an enslaver, through being passed to his daughter, through war, and through emancipation.

I do not know what she had to do to make that happen.

I do not know what she prayed.

I do not know what she whispered to her children.

I do not know what she had to swallow, endure or survive.

The record does not tell me that.

But I can see the result.

She held on to her boys.

Then the Names Started Becoming People

The first time I looked at the probate, I saw Martha and her sons.

The next time, I saw Levi.

At first, Levi was just another name.

Then I found the marriage records for John and Edmund, and both of them listed Levi as their father.

Now I had questions.

Who was Levi?

Did Martha love him?

Were they allowed to live together as a family?

Where was he in 1870?

What happened to him?

I have not found a marriage record for Martha and Levi. That does not necessarily mean they were not married in every way that mattered to them. Enslaved people were not granted the legal right to marry. Families could be recognized within their own communities while having no protection under the law.

But there is another detail I cannot ignore.

Spencer did not list Levi as his father.

John and Edmund did.

That matters.

I am not going to force the records to tell me a story just because I want the pieces to fit neatly. Levi may have been the father of some of Martha’s children and not others.

I do not know.

Then I found Sarah.

A baptism record identified Sarah as the infant daughter of Martha and Levi.

Martha had a daughter.

I remember looking at that record and just sitting there.

She had a daughter.

Sarah was listed in the church records. She was also listed in the probate with Martha and the boys.

But by 1870, she was gone.

I have not found her in the census. I have not found a marriage record. I have not found another record that clearly tells me what happened to her.

She appears, and then she disappears.

Did she die as a child?

Was she separated from the family?

Did she grow up, marry, and end up in records under another name?

I do not know.

That is one of the hardest parts about this research. Sometimes you find enough to learn that someone existed, but not enough to learn how they lived or what became of them.

There are other names I keep returning to as well.

Matilda.

Who was she?

Was she Martha’s mother? Her grandmother? Another relative?

I do not know, and I am not going to draw conclusions without proof.

But it is a thread I have not stopped looking at.

Robert, the youngest boy in Martha’s 1870 household, was not listed in the probate because he was born after emancipation.

That is another thread I have not fully pulled.

Every time I return to the probate, I notice something different.

The record does not change.

I do.

The more I learn, the more the names begin to move off the page.

They become fathers.

Mothers.

Children.

Missing daughters.

Questions.

The Last Enslaver of My Family

Arete Yarborough was Wood T. Johnson’s daughter.

She inherited Martha and her family after her father died.

That makes Arete the last known enslaver of my family.

That is a strange sentence to write.

I am intrigued by Arete, and I want to be clear about what I mean by that. I am not interested in softening her role or making her sympathetic at Martha’s expense.

I am interested because her life may hold information about Martha’s.

Arete was married, but she later became a widow. Her husband died shortly before emancipation.

I found Freedmen’s Bureau records that appear to reference an “A. E. Yarborough” as someone who would soon have formerly enslaved people, single mothers and others in need of food, medical care, and assistance.

When I read that, I immediately thought of Martha.

That could have been her.

A woman preparing to leave slavery with children, no wealth, and no protection.

The probate told me Martha had been enslaved on Wood T. Johnson’s plantation.

It told me she was transferred to Arete.

But Martha did not become a Yarborough.

She remained a Johnson.

That makes me wonder whether she had been on the Johnson plantation for most, if not all, of her life.

Was she born there?

Was her mother there?

Was Matilda her mother?

Did the Johnson name come from the plantation, the family or something Martha chose to keep for reasons only she understood?

I do not know yet.

The church records that helped me connect some of these names were not easy to find. I found them because someone else had been researching their own family’s enslaver, Arete Yarborough, and posted the information on an old blog in 2018.

That is another thing about genealogy: sometimes your breakthrough is sitting inside another person’s search.

Somebody else’s ancestor crossed paths with yours.

Somebody else kept a blog online long enough for you to find it years later.

Somebody else transcribed a church record that included the name of a little Black girl named Sarah.

And suddenly, your family expands.

What the Record Refuses to Tell Me

The probate tells me that Martha was enslaved.

It tells me that she was on Wood T. Johnson’s plantation.

It tells me that she and her children were passed to his daughter.

It tells me that Levi, Sarah, Spencer, John and Edmund were close enough on the page for me to begin asking questions about their relationships.

It tells me that Martha held on to her boys when so many mothers could not.

But it does not tell me how.

It does not tell me what prayers she spoke.

It does not tell me what she did to relieve stress.

It does not tell me whether she laughed loudly.

It does not tell me what made her feel safe.

It does not tell me how she comforted her children when somebody was sold away from the plantation.

It does not tell me what she thought freedom would feel like.

Those are the things my heart is searching for.

I can find her name.

I can find her age.

I can find her children.

I can find the name of the person who inherited her.

But I am still looking for Martha.

The woman.

When I look at pictures of my father, my grandmother and my aunt, I wonder whether Martha is somewhere in their faces.

I wonder whether she is somewhere in me.

I Am Living the Larger Meaning

I have been having a hard time explaining what the larger meaning of this discovery is.

Maybe that is because I am living it.

This past weekend, we celebrated my grandfather’s seventy-seventh birthday. My mother’s father.

While I was driving, it suddenly hit me how lucky my son is.

He has met his great-grandparents.

He may not remember his great-grandmother clearly, but I can show him pictures. He has photographs of himself with her.

He was able to celebrate his great-grandfather’s seventy-seventh birthday and take pictures with him.

That matters.

I do not have pictures of myself with my great-grandparents.

I have stories.

I have a few sensory memories.

I have names on paper.

My son has the ability to look back and see himself standing inside his family.

That is something Martha could not have imagined when her children could be listed in an estate alongside livestock, furniture and land.

She could not take pictures of her boys.

She could not save videos of their voices.

She could not build a family tree online.

She could not know that generations later, one of her descendants would be sitting on her bed, staring at her name and crying over the fact that she kept her family together.

But here we are.

Her son Spencer lived.

His children lived.

Their children lived.

And now my son gets to sit beside his great-grandfather and smile for a picture.

That is the larger meaning.

When I found the probate, I had no idea where it would take me.

I thought I had found proof of enslavement.

What I really found was evidence of a family refusing to disappear.

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I quickly turned years of watching detective shows into an actual skill. Spencer was not revealing himself in the 1870 Census records. So I had to find a new thread to pull. By following the lives of his younger brothers, Edmund, John, and Robert, I was able to find Martha in the 1870 census. I literally had to search sideways. When I could not find Spencer directly, I stopped searching only for him. I searched for the people around him. His brothers became evidence. Their ages, names, location, and relationship to Martha helped me confirm that the misspelled “Mantas” in 1870 was not a dead end, but a doorway.

In Black genealogy, sometimes you cannot go straight back. You have to move through siblings, neighbors, households, surnames, and absences.

The 1870 wall is not just a research challenge. It is a reminder that slavery interrupted the way Black families were allowed to be recorded. Before emancipation, our ancestors were often unnamed in federal census records, counted under the names of the people who enslaved them. So when I reached 1870, I was not just looking for missing documents. I was standing at the edge of a system that had never intended to preserve my family whole.

Searching sideways taught me to stop expecting the records to hand me the story directly. Spencer’s absence did not mean he was gone. It meant I had to pay closer attention to everyone around him. His brothers became witnesses. Martha’s household became evidence. A misspelled name became a clue instead of a closed door.

That is what reconstruction requires. It asks me to trust the fragments without forcing them to say more than they can. It asks me to follow the people beside the person I am looking for. And in this case, searching sideways did not just help me find Martha. It helped me understand that my family’s story was still there, waiting to be read differently.

But one question remained: if Martha was in Franklinton in 1870 with Edmund, John, and Robert, where was Spencer?

That name was the initial discovery. A name never spoken by my relatives still living, but one I will never forget. Martha was Spencer Johnson’s mother. Spencer was the father of George Johnson Sr., my great-grandfather. At a very young age and much of my young adult life, I knew how lucky I was to have grown up learning the importance of family. It was following the Johnson surname that led me to discover my enslaved ancestors, Spencer and his mother, Martha. The woman who was born on a plantation during slavery. My great-great-great-grandmother.

In 1870, Martha, at the age of 44, was living in Franklinton, NC, with her sons, Edmund (12), John (16), and Robert (4). This scene is set by the 1870 Census record, the first federal census after emancipation, where formerly enslaved people were recorded by name. Just years after she was declared a free woman, I see Martha as a single mother caring for brown boys. I myself, a mother of a brown, beautiful boy, immediately saw her strength. She held on to her boys. In a world that had already taken so much from Black mothers, she held on to her boys. It was also very apparent that Spencer was not in this household. If I had allowed someone else’s carelessness to sway me, I wouldn’t have been able to tell her story.

The census records mispelled her name, but an 1880 Census record corrected the story and told a bigger unwritten story. In 1870, I saw a mother. In 1880, I see the foundation of my family. In 1880, Spencer, at the age of 33, was living in Franklinton, NC, with his first wife, Julia, and his year-old son, Thomas. Also in his household were his brothers, Robert (14) and Edmund (22), his mother Martha (54), and his brother, John (26), and lastly his niece, Susan (12). Post-Emancipation, I saw a mother holding on to her children, and I imagined the kind of mother she must have been for her oldest known son to become the family anchor.

From there, more unwritten stories began to open: the story of how a family was rebuilt after emancipation, and the story of Dr. Wood T. Johnson’s plantation.

Martha was born in 1826, likely on the plantation of Dr. Wood T Johnson. Martha appears after emancipation in Franklinton, and before emancipation, she appears in Wood T. Johnson’s probate record. Her estimated birth year places her birth during slavery. I discovered that to know more about Martha, I would have to get to know the enslaver that she carried the surname of. In a 1862 probate record, W. T Johnson had a total of 73 enslaved people, including Martha, Edmund, John, and others, to be passed on to his eldest daughter, Arete Yarborough, upon his death. Based on the probate record, Arete Yarborough became the last known enslaver of my family. Martha would spend 3 years enslaved under her ownership before being emancipated. At this moment, I was no longer filling in a family tree; I had now begun reconstructing my family history through enslavement. Reviewing slave schedules with no names but ages that fit the bodies of my ancestors.

Martha would have been 36 in 1862. The age I turn this year. She was a legally free woman at the age of 39. What I am learning is that reconstruction requires patience. It requires reading names, ages, neighbors, surnames, land, probate records, marriage licenses, and absences together. It requires accepting what I can prove, naming what I can only suspect, and refusing to treat silence as the end of the story.

This is why I am starting Unwritten Generation.

This will be a place where I share the reconstruction of my family’s enslavement history in real time. Not as a finished story with every answer already found, but as a living archive of what I am discovering, questioning, grieving, and piecing together. I will share the records, the names, the silences, the mistakes, the theories, and the moments when something small opens a door to something much bigger.

I am writing this for Martha. I am writing this for Spencer, Edmund, John, Robert, and the others whose lives were recorded only when someone else had power over them. I am writing this for the Black families who know what it feels like to hit the 1870 wall and wonder if the story ends there. I am writing this for the women whose names were misspelled, misplaced, or never spoken, but whose lives still shaped generations.

Unwritten Generation is my attempt to tell the story with care. To teach what I have learned. To honor what I can prove. To be honest about what I cannot. To hold the fragments without letting the silence win.

Subscribe now

I am beginning with a small goal: 10 founding paid subscribers who believe this work deserves time, attention, and support. But more than anything, I am asking you to walk with me as I follow the records back, as I recover what I can, and as I write toward the generations who were never given the chance to write themselves.