Tag Archives: marriage

Enslaved People, Maternal Kin, North Carolina, Oral History

Henry W. McNeely.

My grandmother said he looked a bit like a poet. Or so she was told:

See, I never did know Grandpa Henry. I didn’t know him.  He died just as Louise was born. Mama had just had Louise, and it was real hot and all, and they told her she couldn’t go to the funeral because it was so warm and she would take cold.  But I didn’t know him. 

And:

Mama said he looked just like Walt Whitman.  You know, he was, his father was white. I don’t know who his mother was. I don’t know if she was mulatto or what.  But anyway, he was really light.  And he lived on the same farm as his daddy.  And he provided him, he provided for him as if he was his own child.

White child, that is.

Henry W. McNeely was 22 years old the year his father reported to the tax assessor that he was worth $1500. The tax list is his first named appearance in the record, and documentation of his life is relatively scarce thereafter. He registered to vote in Rowan County in 1868 and appears in his mother’s household in Atwell township, Rowan County, in the 1870 census.  (He was described as a schoolteacher. Had his father taught him to read while he was enslaved? Or was he a quick learner in a Reconstruction school?) In 1872, he married 18 year-old Martha Miller and, in a daring gesture, named Wilson McNeely as his father on the license. The register of deeds did not blink and dutifully noted that all parties, except Wilson, were colored.
Image

[Sidenote: “Louise” was Mary Louise Colvert Renwick, my grandmother’s sister, born in 1906. — LYH]

——

Interview of Margaret C. Allen by Lisa Y. Henderson; all rights reserved.

Standard
Births Deaths Marriages, Enslaved People, Maternal Kin, North Carolina, Other Documents

Cohabitation as man and wife.

COLVERT -- Walker Colvert Rebecca Parks CohabitationIn March 1866, in order to ratify marriages and legitimate children, the North Carolina General Assembly passed an Act directing Justices of the Peace to collect and record in the County Clerk’s office the cohabitations of former slaves. Freedmen who did not record their marriages by September, 1866, faced misdemeanor charges. Stragglers rushed the courthouse that August, and on the 25th Walker Colvert and Rebecca Parks traveled the 12 miles or so from Eagle Mills to stand in line. They declared that they had been together for 13 years and named three children, John, Elvira and Lovenia. (There should also have been a son Lewis, the youngest — and who in the world is Lovenia? I have found no trace of her.)

Walker, fifty-ish at the time, was my great-great-great-grandfather. He was born in Culpeper County, Virginia, then passed, like a bedframe or milk cow, from one Colvert to another and into Iredell County, North Carolina. Rebecca was not his first wife, and his age suggests earlier children, names and fates unknown. My grandmother, who died in 2010 at age 101, knew and remembered Rebecca. And, like that, a link across five generations.

Standard
Births Deaths Marriages, Free People of Color, North Carolina, Paternal Kin

Marriage.

Throughout the summer of 1866, they converged in pairs on the tiny hamlet of Goldsboro. In their least-patched clothing and maybe in shoes, they were dusty and footsore by time they arrived at the courthouse looming over the center of town. Under a scorching white sky, with depthless farmwork begrudging every moment away, they made their way to claim what had only recently seemed like fantasy — a marriage license. North Carolina had offered to legitimate all slave cohabitations, and thousands took up the offer.

Watching them go, self-proud and probably envious, were ancestors like mine — Lewis and Mag Henderson. They had been together 15 years by then and could have married legally at any time, but were too poor to afford the fees and too wary besides of inviting unnecessary scrutiny of their free colored lives. Even if they craved legitimacy, however, they did not avail themselves of the 1866 law. They had not been slaves. Until he died in 1912 and she in 1915, Lewis and Mag lived in quiet mutual devotion — without government sanction.

A hundred years after his forebears spurned the law, another Henderson happily paid for his license and was married in the shade-dappled sideyard of his bride’s grandparents’ house. My parents celebrated 52 years in May.

Standard