The materials contained at ancestry.com unlock many dimensions of the enslaved and freed individuals documented in the Stephens’ papers. Census, probate, marriage, and tax digest materials collected there can be usefully supplemented by the various genealogical tools available in the reference collections of the Georgia State Archives (in Morrow) and at local libraries such as the Taliaferro County Library.

Important materials (deeds, marriage records, and newspaper coverage, for instance) have been assembled in two county-level histories, which can be consulted at several genealogical sites. These are: Alvin Mell Lunceford, Taliaferro County, Georgia: Records and Notes (Reprint, 1989) and Forrest Shivers, The Land Between: A History of Hancock County, Georgia to 1940 (Reprint, 1990).

Below are other sources (to be selectively expanded as this project advances) that inform the contextualizing efforts made in compiling Life Stories of Black Georgians.

Academic Historians /Professional Writers exploring Taliaferro, Clarke, and Wilkes Counties

J. William Harris, Plain folk and gentry in a slave society: white liberty and black slavery in Augusta’s hinterlands. LSU Press, 1998.

Channing Joseph, “The First Drag Queen was a Former Slave” Nation Magazine.

Christopher R. Lawton, Laura E. Nelson, and Randy L. Reid, eds. Seen/unseen: Hidden Lives in a Community of Enslaved Georgians. University of Georgia Press, 2021.

Daina Ramey Berry. “Swing the sickle for the harvest is ripe”: gender and slavery in antebellum Georgia. University of Illinois Press, 2007.

Academic Historians /Professional Writers on Hancock County

Adele Logan Alexander, Ambiguous lives: free women of color in rural Georgia, 1789-1879. Senac, 1991.

K.A. Leslie, Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson, 1849-1893. University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Mark Schultz. The rural face of white supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow. University of Illinois Press, 2005.

Leo Braselton Gorman. “Religion, Segregation, and Voting Rights: Unforgetting the Legacies of Bishops George Foster Pierce and Lucius Henry Holsey in Hancock County, Georgia, USA.” Genealogy 5, no. 3 (2021): 64.

Glenn T. Eskew. “Black Elitism and the Failure of Paternalism in Postbellum Georgia: The Case of Bishop Lucius Henry Holsey.” The Journal of Southern History 58, no. 4 (1992): 637-666.

Recent Academic Work on Captive and Redeemed Black Lives (a very selective list)

NOTE: Histories of American slavery abound and this literature proliferates rapidly. The following books have helped us to develop issues of locality, disruption, kinship, conjugal intimacy, antebellum free persons of color, and post-emancipation struggles and predicaments. Our approach to slavery-based story-telling from white-authored archives draws from Lawton, Nelson, and Reid, listed above.

Calvin Schermerhorn, Unrequited toil: a history of United States slavery. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Damian Pargas, Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: slave neighborhoods in the Old South. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Stephanie MH Camp, Closer to freedom: Enslaved women and everyday resistance in the plantation south. University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Tera W. Hunter, Bound in wedlock: Slave and free black marriage in the nineteenth century. Harvard University Press, 2017.

Warren Eugene Milteer Jr, Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South. University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

David T. Gleeson, “The Rhetoric of Insurrection and Fear: The Politics of Slave Management in Confederate Georgia.” Journal of Southern History 89, no. 2 (2023): 237-266.

Kidada E. Williams, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2023.

Steven Hahn, A nation under our feet: Black political struggles in the rural South from slavery to the Great Migration. Harvard University Press, 2005.