Fourth Generation Inclusive

Historical Documents of Genealogical Interest to Researchers of North Carolina's Free People of Color

Month: September, 2013

September 30, 2013

Made good.

“Colter’s entire life has consisted of challenges accepted and made good on. He was born on January 8, 1910, in Noblesville, Indiana, a small farming town about forty miles east of Indianapolis. On both side of the family his ancestors were free blacks who had settled in Indiana several years before the Civil War. Colter possesses a ledger tracing his mother’s family back to Britton Bassett, the son of a black man and a white woman in North Carolina, who was granted his freedom in 1797 when he was twenty-one and given a horse, bridle and saddle, and one hundred dollars. In the 1830s Bassett moved his wife and children to Indiana, traveling by night and hiding by day in order to elude slave hunters.”

— from the introduction to Cyrus Colter‘s The Rivers of Eros (1991).

[Sidenote: Britton Bassett, as the son of a white woman, was born free, not set free. Perhaps 1797 marked the end of his involuntary apprenticeship. He had a son Britton, who also had a son Britton and another named Daniel. Britton and Daniel married daughters of Montreville and Anna J. Henderson Simmons, who were born free in North Carolina and migrated to Indiana by way of Ontario, Canada.]

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September 1, 2013

Richard Artis.

There had been a photograph of Adam Artis, cousin Daisy told me, but it had been stored with other things in a barn, and rain had ruined it. She recalled an image of a  brown-skinned man, or the suggestion of one anyway in the soft sepia and charcoal portraits of the day.

If no photograph of Adam exists, however, there is one of his youngest brother. His image, in fact, is the only one known of any of Vicey Artis and Solomon Williams’ children.

Image

Richard Artis was born in 1850 in Greene County, very near Wayne. He spent his youth out of sight of censustakers, but in 1873, he married Susanna Yelverton (also known as Susanna Hall, the daughter of free woman of color Nicey [or Caroline] Hall and a white Yelverton.) Their children included: Lucinda Artis Shearod, Emma Artis Reid, Ivory L. Artis, Loumiza Artis Grantham, Richard Artis Jr., Susan Artis Cooper, Jonah Artis, Charity Artis Coley, Frances Artis Newsome, John Henry Artis and Walter Clinton Artis.

Richard Artis farmed in northern Wayne County all his life. He died 12 February 1923 in Great Swamp township of apoplexy and was buried the next day by the son of his sister, Zilpha Artis Wilson.

——

Photo courtesy of Teresa C. Artis.

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