Nancy was an enslaved woman in Boone, Kentucky, who dictated this letter—presumably because she didn’t learn to write—to her enslaver Robert Kirtley requesting that it be sent to her former enslaver, Thomas Davis, so that he could deliver it to her children Ben Oliver and Milly in Orange County, Virginia. As Kirtley references in the letter, he and Davis shared a grandfather through the marriage of Kirtley’s aunt and Davis’s father. The man named Curry mentioned in the letter was formerly enslaved by Robert Kirtley’s father, Jeremiah, with Nancy. This letter powerfully illustrates the way slavery tore apart families.
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