"Lost Friends" and Browning Duncan

   ©  Kathy Duncan, 2020

One of the disadvantages of being willing to jump from one family to another at a moment's notice is that nothing gets "finished," but in genealogy, nothing is ever finished anyway. The advantage of doing a little leaping from project to project is a bonanza of information that seems to be never-ending, so there is that. 

Yesterday, I took a break from laundry and going through the Harding/Dabbs Collection to read the novel The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate. Like many novels, there is a dual storyline that converges as the novel progresses. The Book of Lost Friends takes its title from the "Lost Friends" column of advertisements that appeared in the form of letters from freed slaves searching for family members and appeared in the Southwestern from 1879 until at least 1900. Facsimiles of their letters appear throughout the novel between storylines. 

As I was taking a break from reading, I wondered if there was really a "Lost Friends" column and if it might be accessible through an online database. The answer is yes and yes. That's all it took. I was off and researching like you do when you are receptive to shifting gears at a moment's notice. So far, I've only found one advertisement that pertains to my family.

This advertisement mentions my great-great-great-grandfather, Browning Duncan. After only a moment of puzzling, I realized that the "Peters" family members that Ned and Lucy Boyd were searching for were actually named Pettus. The name Pettus, especially when it is spelled Pettes, might be misinterpreted as Peters. 

This letter is especially difficult to decode, but here is what I have figured out so far based on what I know of Browning Duncan and the Pettus family. Browning Duncan, a native of Madison County, Kentucky, married Rebecca W. Pettus on 25 December 1823 in York County, South Carolina. She was the daughter of William W. Pettus, who died in 1818, leaving a widow, Mary Pettus. One of Rebecca's sisters was Mariah Pettus who married Stephen Partlow Sutton. Additionally, Rebecca had brothers Samuel Knox Pettus, William Watkins Pettus, and Thomas Newton Pettus. 

Here's how I have interpreted the "Lost Friends" letter above. Enslaved persons Ned Sutton and Lucy Peters [Pettus], who was owned by the widow Polly [Mary] Peters [Pettus] of York County, South Carolina were the parents of Martha Peters [Pettus]. Manda and Peters [Pettus] went off with Browning Duncan at the same time. Does this mean Manda and Martha Pettus left with Browning Duncan? When?

By 1827, Browning Duncan and wife were in Madison County, Kentucky, when Mary Pettus deeded a slave man named Frank to her daughter Rebecca (Pettus) Duncan. By 1850 Browning Duncan and his wife were living in Dyer County, Tennesse near the Gibson County, Tennessee border where Rebecca's brother Samuel K Pettus lived. Additionally, brother William Watkins Pettus lived near the Duncan's in Dyer County. Brother Thomas Newton Pettus remained in York County as did their sister Mariah Pettus who had married Stephen Partlow Sutton. 

Then we learn through the letter that Manda was the daughter of James Greer and Liberty Peters [Pettus] who belonged to the widow Polly [Mary] Peters [Pettus]. The reference to Mary Pettus being a widow encompasses the timeframe from 1818 to her death in 1855. 

Then it looks like Emeline Peters [Pettus] was a cousin to Manda and Lucy Peters [Pettus]. Is Emeline a mother to Peggie, Annie, and Lucy? Then Watkins Peters [Pettus] moved to Tennessee, taking Annie and Fannie with him. All the indexers of this letter have Watkins Peters [Pettus] as an enslaved person. However, that's not how I read this. Rebecca W. (Pettus) Duncan brother William Watkins Pettus had removed to Dyer County, Tennessee by 1850. Browning and Rebecca Duncan can be found there in the same year. From Dyer County, the two families removed to Sebastian County, Arkansas by 1860. 

The William Peters [Pettus] who was in Nashville, Tennessee in 1880, is most likely to be a relative of Ned and Lucy's. 

It makes sense to me that the Sutton who sold Ned and Lucy to Louis M. Boyd was Stephen Partlow Sutton who administered William and Mary Pettus's estate for many years. 

One way to begin untangling this is to look at the Pettus estate papers. One document, in particular, was created in 1855 when Mary "Polly" Pettus died and is indexed as being her husband William Pettus's estate.

Among the inventories and appraisements of William Pettus's estate is a list of enslaved people, their ages, and who they were sold to. Those names coincide with most of the names in the letter above.

A girl Amanda age 15 sold to S K Pettus

A girl Martha age 11 sold to S K Pettus

A woman Peg age 35 sold to C L Clawson

A woman Lucy age 28 sold to T N Pettus

A woman Ann and two children sold to S P Sutton

A girl Emmeline age 14 sold to B Dunkin 

You can see from the estate records of the sale of these people how closely the name Pettus looks like Peters:

This sale was held in December 1855 at the home of S P Sutton, so that is the point at which some of these enslaved people were taken away from York County, South Carolina.

My takeaway from the letter in the "Lost Friends" column, combined with the William Pettus estate records, is that in the turmoil and trauma of separating these enslave families there was some resulting confusion over where people went and with whom they went. This combined with the fact that the Pettus name appears erroneously as Peters in the newspaper, that Browning Duncan and wife and been deceased since the 1860s, that S P Sutton is named only by his surname, that Ned and Lucy have been using the Boyd surname unbeknownst to their surviving Pettus family who had been carried off, and I believe it would have been next to impossible for Ned and Lucy Boyd formerly, known as Ned Sutton and Lucy Pettus, to be successfully reunited with their family.

In all likelihood, they invested 50 cents in having their advertisement placed in the Southwestern only to have the information become so garbled as to make it useless. Neither Ned nor Lucy could read. They would not have known that the names were published incorrectly until someone read the newspaper to them. The 50 cents they invested in this effort would be equivalent to nearly $13 today. Since it only appeared once, it is evident that the newspaper did not run a correction, and they could not afford to make a second effort. 

Manda and Martha Pettus were most likely taken to the Samuel Knox Pettus home in Gibson County, Tennessee. It is possible that S K Pettus did not attend the sale in 1855 and that Browning Duncan transported these girls to Tennesse for his brother-in-law. That would be why Lucy believed they were taken away by Browning Duncan. Instead, Browning Duncan purchased Emeline Pettus and would have transported her to Dyer County, Tennessee as well. At age 14, she seems unlikely to have had more than one child. That sentence in the letter about her relationship to Manda and Lucy is still confusing to me. 

In 1880, Lucy Boyd, wife of Ned, was aged 55 on the Kemper County, Mississippi census, and had been born in South Carolina. She was the same age as the Lucy who was listed in the William Pettus estate and sold to T N Pettus. Evidently, at some point after 1855, she must have been sold to S P Sutton, who later sold Lucy and Ned to Louis M Boyd. 

It is possible that additional information might be found in deed records, but anyone seeking the extended family of Ned and Lucy Boyd should be looking for the Pettus family not the Peters family.