Every document used to reconstruct Jaunty's life is presented here: the wills, probate inventories, chancery petitions, mortgages, censuses, estate sales, store ledgers, newspapers, and Freedmen's Bureau papers that carry her family from a 1776 deed of gift in Virginia, through the Stevens estates of Union County, South Carolina, to freedom in Greene County, Alabama. Read alongside the case study overview, this is how a family history is proven, document by document.
Documents are grouped the way a genealogist actually works: by the estate, case, or record set that produced them. Each set explains why the record matters before you open it. 🏆 marks the pivotal document of each chapter; 🧱 marks records that carried the research across the 1865–1870 wall and back into slavery-era files. Click any card to page through the original scans.
Chancery petitions that preserve four generations of kinship, inventories read as demography, mortgage records that date a childhood, census neighbors that bridge two states — these methods work for any family line. Start in the state library, or bring your brick wall to a professional.
Documents were gathered from county courthouses, the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Alabama repositories, FamilySearch and Ancestry collections, and private ledgers, then transcribed and analyzed in the Jaunty Underwood research journal by Kellie M. Farrish, Reparative Genealogy.