Duke doctoral candidate Cynthia Greenlee-Donnell will be featured on PBS' "History Detectives" on Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2014. The show investigates historical "mysteries" or helps identify historical objects. In its 10th season, "History Detectives" enlists historians, other academics, and appraisers to use traditional archival research, technology, and legwork to shed light on episodes from the past.
As a sixth-year doctoral candidate who focuses on black girls and the law in late-nineteenth century South Carolina, Greenlee-Donnell helped University of Arizona historian and "History Detectives" host Eduardo Pagan trace a young enslaved girl named Willoby.
The story began when Jeanie Hans found a centuries-old document in a family attic: an 1829 bill of sale for Willoby. The bill of sale was a receipt summarizing teenaged Willoby’s sale in Charleston District to a James Daniels of Pee Dee, South Carolina. Hans wanted to know what happened to Willoby. Did she see freedom or have her own family?
Greenlee-Donnell had questions of her own.
"Though my research focuses on the late 1800s and not the antebellum period of the bill of sale, I was intrigued by the prospect of trying to find Willoby. I study black girlhood, and I wondered what it meant for this 17-year-old to be sold. On paper, the bill of sale seems like a simple document. But it represented a rupture. Was Willoby sold away from her family? Was she sold because of her master's death, some other change in the household's material circumstances, or her own behavior? What social networks did she have to leave behind, and how would she rebuild them in a new place? We thought we could start answering that last question through the historical paper trail" including probate or estate records and census data.
Viewers will get to walk through the paper trail on the show. To see some of the documents, go to http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/investigation/bill-of-sale/.
Greenlee-Donnell was doubly interested in Willoby’s story because Pee Dee, South Carolina, was extremely close to her mother's hometown of Lake City, a small town in northeast South Carolina. And her mother’s maiden name was Daniels — same as surname of the nineteenth-century slaveholder who bought Willoby.
"I was initially contacted by the show because they were looking for someone with expertise in the Pee Dee region, which is understudied compared with the Low Country around Charleston and the upcountry," said Greenlee-Donnell. "As it turns out, because this is a relatively small area, we discovered an interesting surprise: that Willoby's story connected quite directly with my own family history. But you'll have to watch the show to find out what that is."
"History Detectives" airs on PBS Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
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