08/28/2026
Post originally made in 2018:
Settle in, friends. Grab a cup of coffee and head for your favorite armchair...for this is a long story. It starts in the last quarter of the 18th century, when Lyles Baptist Church was formed at Wilmington in Fluvanna County. Members at Lyles held Divine services and Conferences - church business meetings - monthly. Being good Baptists, the folks at Lyles kept meticulous records. The Baptist Historical Society at the University of Richmond has preserved those records for more than one hundred years. Minute books contain records of church disciplinary matters, rolls of the membership, and records of church officers. Some pages are missing, and others faded into obscurity, but all in all it is a remarkable set of documents.
At that time, in that faith, the church had the ability to chastise its members for “disorderly” behavior. Members found guilty could be excluded from the fellowship of the church, or they could be excommunicated. Public drunkenness, swearing, causing an “affray,” adultery, and having a child out of wedlock were all cause for investigation and possible punishment.
A recent research request sent us on a mission. The Library of Virginia, it turns out, had copied the fragile Minute Books in the 1950’s using a curious process that results in the image being printed as a negative - with the background black, and the writing white. The LVA gave one copy of the books back to the Baptist Historical Society, along with the originals, and kept one copy of each of the four books for themselves. The LVA graciously permitted us to photograph their copies, using our phones. Thanks to Kelly Crawford for spending a long day in the archives room at LVA with me, snapping pictures of each page and emailing them to my address.
The next step would be to print those photographs, but... can you imagine how much ink that would have taken? We are, after all, a non-profit, and we are downright stingy with office supplies. Then another friend and volunteer, Lynn Stayton Eurell, came to the rescue. Lynn, a graphic artist, has the software and the skill - and the generous nature - to reverse all of the images back to a white background with black writing.
Then I started my work. Peering at the screen of my laptop, wrestling with difficult penmanship and unusual turns of phrase, I read all of each of the books, carefully copying down by hand any record that met the parameters of the research request - any record concerning the Black members, mostly enslaved, who attended Lyles alongside the people who enslaved them.
Page after page of notes, long columns of the names of the enslaved - known only by a first name and the name of those who enslaved them...it took dozens of hours to do the job, and sadly, it took longer than I had anticipated (slow internet speeds being the bane of my existence.) I missed the deadline - but not through want of effort.
I finally finished the project, compiled the references and member rolls and handed them over to the person who requested the information. A “granddaughter” church of Lyles - Evergreen - celebrated its 130th anniversary, and I could not get the records that tell the background story of the birth of Evergreen ready in time. Sadly the records of the most pertinent time - the months in the record where Lyles would have been discussing the creation of Byrd Grove Church, which in turn just a handful of years later led to the creation of Evergreen - are missing.
As I scrambled to decipher the last handful of pages, I made a stunning realization. There, written in a hurried hand, difficult to read and at times illegible, was genealogical gold. A roll of the Black members of Lyles Baptist Church in 1870...and at least a third of them included both their post-Emancipation surnames AND the names of their former enslavers.
Think about that for a moment. For many descendants of people who were enslaved, there is an impenetrable genealogical wall at the 1870 census. There in the first record in which ALL of the population of this nation are identified by name, are the names of their ancestors...but where were they before 1870? Unless you know the names of the people who enslaved your ancestors...you are stuck.
This record will mean so much to the descendants of the recently Emancipated people identified in it. Another step along the journey to the history of those who came before. A little bit farther along the journey into their past - and themselves.
