Getting rid of Riley: Answers in community-wide research

The real magic of genealogy manifests outside the traditional box—beyond the standard family tree data. Let me tell you about a man named Riley and the odd place I found the next piece of his story.

When my 3GG Jacob Mayberry sat down to write his amended (again) last will and testament on 22 August 1851, he included an odd little patch of text:

I wish the bridge across the Cahawba River to be sold and my negro man by the name of Riley also my still and all the apperattes thereunto belonging to be sold

Alabama, Bibb County Probate Court. “Mayberry Records, Bibb County Administrators’ Records Book G.” Centreville, Bibb County, Alabama, 1855 1851. Alabama, Wills and Probate Records, 1753-1999. Administrators’ Records Book G, 1851-55. pp. 89. Ancestry.com.

Hm. He sells the bridge and still. OK. But what about Riley?

Did he do this to drive me crazy, because it bothers me no end. Jacob’s inventory lists 42 men, women, and children enslaved by him. He had banked his mortal security on them. They were his 401K.

But of 42, his will only specifies the precise fate of one: Riley.

The estate was to rid itself of Riley–and the bridge that first opened traffic from Tuscaloosa to Centreville, Alabama, in the heyday of the cotton boom.

The fact that I noticed Riley at all came from my illumination a few years ago—the realization that the story of America’s enslaved people is tied to the slaveholder’s records. In other words, documenting the WHOLE plantation is my job. That epiphany became the Beyond Kin Project (BKP), for those who are just now joining the GEG experience in progress.

Thanks, then, to the BKP, Riley was not simply a mention in an old document. He’s a man with a story I want to know.

I was able to find out who bought him. He ended up on the Avery plantation down the road and eventually took the name Riley Avery, after the Civil War. He married Dinah, and they had four daughters and two sons that I know of, living out their lives as farmers in Bibb County.

Thanks to my documentation of Riley, I became acquainted with a college professor in Birmingham who descends from people also enslaved on the Avery plantation. That friendship will always make Riley special to me.

But I am still in the dark. Why did Jacob want to get rid of Riley…just Riley?

Did Riley man the toll bridge? Was he therefore redundant upon the sale of the bridge? Was Riley more expensive than the others, bringing in more cash to even up the divide of assets between the children? (I know, it’s hard to stomach that some enslaved people had to be the dividable “cash” in estate management.)

Riley’s story slipped into a pocket in my mind as I moved on to other things. About a month ago, I made a commitment to expand my BKP research in a new way. I decided to research not just the plantation, but the community—black and white. I began the process of documenting every house in the vicinity of Jacob’s hotel on the Cahaba River. I was amazed to discover that just about every household was either intermarried with the next or would eventually be. That was an education for me. Go wide, go deep, when doing genealogy.

There were nineteen households in my first section to research. It was clearly the downtown Centreville area. Most of the houses had boarders: lawyers, peddlers, saddlers, merchants and clerks.

Then one line in the census stopped me cold. This is the white man’s census…1850. But there was a line that gave only the name “Riley.” Occupation? Slave.

What?

When had a slave been entered into the 1850 census as a household with an occupation?

That’s when I noticed a little word written perpendicularly in the margin. It said “Jail.”

Ah, the murky details grow ever so slightly clearer. As I picture Jacob writing his will now, I suspect he’s thinking of Riley as trouble of some kind. Not a cashable asset or a redundant tollkeeper.

So now I have new questions and a potential place to look. I’ll be looking at a different type of court records next time I visit Centreville. Now, I want to know, “Why was Riley in jail?”

The mystery might keep unfolding for ages, and it keeps getting richer for me. It’s not just that Riley Avery is becoming a flesh-and-blood memory with a rich story. It’s that Riley is teaching me how much richer my own ancestry becomes when I move beyond birth and death dates, beyond a nuclear white family, beyond one house on the river, and see what the larger landscape can tell me. See what community-wide research can tell me.

Stay tuned for more on Riley….

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