Article on Tracing One Family’s Path to Freedom, Through Love

Terry Franklin recently published an article entitled, Tracing One Family’s Path to Freedom, Through Love, 28 Probate & Property No. 5 (Sept. & Oct. 2014).  Provided below is an excerpt from the article:

This story is about my search, as a trust and estate lawyer, to find answers to questions about my family’s heritage and to try to discover evidence of the role that rape or love may have played in how my family came to be.

I grew up in Chicago, where my mother’s family lived after migrating from Southern Illinois. We always knew that our ancestors had settled in Southern Illinois in the mid-1840s. Family lore and research performed by a long-deceased distant cousin informed us that there was a will made by my great-, great-, great-, great-grandfather, John Sutton, who died in 1846. We had an abstract of a portion of the will made by John, a white farmer in Duval County, Florida. (Jacksonville is the county seat.) Based on the abstract, we knew that the will provided first for the payment of John’s debts and, then, for his “mulatto slave Lucie” and her eight children, including her daughter, Easter, and Easter’s own six children to be set free on John’s death. The will included a specific direction that they all be moved “to the states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, or a foreign country where they and their children could live free forever.”