“Inquiring of a family by the name of King”: Seeking Family after the Civil War

On June 18^th, 1882, a woman from wrote from Corinth, Mississippi to the sheriff in Mecklenburg County, Virginia requesting the man’s “kined atenchen [sic]” to her “inquiring of a family by the name of King.” The author, assumed to be the Jennie Brown mentioned farther along in the letter, explained that she was “soled before the war by the sharrief…at the coart houe at Masson Burge…”[sic]. Two decades after her enslaver sold her away from her family, Brown sought to reunite with her kin.

We continue to work our way through indexing and digitizing records from the Free and Enslaved collections for Virginia Untold. In February and April last year, I wrote a two-part blog series about three women who were reported as fugitives from slavery in a letter from their enslaver to local officials. This letter was not digitized. As we review the boxes from these collections, unique and not-easily-categorized documents continue to surface. While we’ve been aware of these records for some time, provided item level descriptions in the finding aids or catalog records, even some of these “miscellaneous” items are still not available to the public digitally and searchable through our digital collections. We’re working on that! In addition to finishing up our Free Register project, we will be working to get these documents available through Virginia Untold in 2026.

In the meantime, writing blog posts is one way of sharing these stories and the subject of today’s blog is Jennie Brown. Seventeen years after the end of slavery, Brown wrote the sheriff in Mecklenburg County trying to find her people. Her remarkable letter survives providing us with a rare firsthand account of one woman’s persistent search that spanned decades.

While some of the letter was written in first person, the author switches to third person about halfway through the note. Brown may have asked a person she trusted to write for her. The author addressed the letter from Corinth in Alcorn County, Mississippi—the town where Brown ended up after being sold—some 700 miles from Mecklenburg County, Virginia. Corinth is in the northeast corner of the state about 100 miles east of Memphis, Tennessee. As explained in the missive, Jennie had married a man with the last name Brown since being sold. Before the war, she may have been referred to as Jennie King. Her mother, Angey King was enslaved by a person named Mr. King and his wife Rebecca King. His son, Eadey King may have inherited his father’s enslaved people upon his death. Jennie Brown’s grandmother (name not provided) lived in Petersburg. Brown and her writer included several other names of possible family members including a stepfather named Jim Walker and his three children Lucey, Jim, and Martha. Brown suspected that her biological father’s name was Volentine (sometimes written as Valentine). “Voluntine”, “Volentine”, “Valentine” are common surnames associated with enslaved and free Black people found in documents from Mecklenburg County and other Southside localities. For over thirty years, Jennie Brown retained these names, locations, and details in anticipation of putting them on paper to reconnect after slavery.

I recently learned a statistic shared by the historian and author of Last Seen Judith Giesberg that the success rate of connecting families after slavery was less than 2%.¹Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery is a digital project containing over 4,500 advertisements placed in newspapers across America by those trying to find family members separated by slavery. I used several different keywords to search for an ad relating to Jennie Brown in the Last Seen database but didn’t find where she took out an ad. Instead, Brown took the route of writing directly to the sheriff. Perhaps she recognized the likelihood that the sheriff, a local official, would be familiar with many people in the locality. Sheriffs served executions, delivered summons, collected taxes among other tasks that put them in direct contact with local citizens. In 1860, Mecklenburg County had one of the largest enslaved populations in the state (12,420 individuals).²

There are several people with the surname King in Mecklenburg County recorded in pre-Civil War documents, but the “Mr. King” who Jennie Brown refers to in her letter may have been Richard R. King (b. ca. 1800). He is listed in the 1850 census with his wife Rebecca King and their son Edwin (presumably the son Brown names “Eady”) and a little girl Mary Matthews.³ The biggest clue, however, might be the family listed just two households away in the 1870 census: a Black family with the surname King.⁴ The head of household was a woman named Angeline King aged 39 living with three children Martha, Abram, and Nannie. Was this woman Jennie’s mother “Angey” King? Ten years later an Angeline King is listed in the 1880 census in Roanoke with several children, three of whom match the names listed in Jennie Brown’s letter: William, Martha, and Lucy.⁵

More research is certainly needed, but the records are out there. One must wonder if this Angeline King was in fact Brown’s mother, did her move to Roanoke before 1880 complicate Brown’s efforts to locate her family?

We don’t know if the sheriff tried to find Brown’s people. We don’t even know if he read her letter. At the very least, we know he filed it in the court papers where it remained for decades in the Mecklenburg County courthouse. This explains why it is now categorized as a local record in the Library’s archives. Eventually, the record set made its way to LVA at which point an archivist filed into the Free and Enslaved collection. It’s not obvious to search for personal documents of this nature in court records. This example is a good reminder that looking in a variety of collections, archives, and record sets is good practice for researching enslaved people.

We don’t know if Jennie Brown found her family. But someone found Jennie Brown’s letter and put it in this box. And now, maybe for the third, fourth, or however many times someone has come across this letter. I hope that because of our efforts to scan and make these documents available someone, maybe even her descendants, will find Jennie Brown.