Sharswood, part 6: How the records linked David and Violet to the plantation

Family knowledge set the direction

Sonya Womack-Miranda says she began her family-history search in 2011 and went to the Pittsylvania County courthouse in 2018 to test family knowledge about a ‘Miller plantation.’ She credits an older family historian, Alberta Elizabeth Miller Womack, with clues that helped researchers connect David and Violet Miller to Sharswood.

That sequence is a useful model. Oral history supplied names and a place to investigate; courthouse and genealogical sources were used to test the connection.

Family testimony was not discarded, and a repeated family story was not treated as proof without records.

Three records formed the chain

Sarah Miller’s death certificate named David and Violet as her parents. The 1870 census then recorded David and Violet by name as farmhands in a household that included young Sarah, Emily, and Samuel.

It was the first federal census after the Civil War to place formerly enslaved family members together by name.

Because Samuel was listed as five, genealogist Karice Luck-Brimmer searched Virginia’s slave birth register. The entry shown by 60 Minutes placed Samuel under N.

C. Miller and named Violet as his mother.

CBS reports that Luck-Brimmer concluded the evidence connected David and Violet to enslavement at Sharswood.

What the method does—and does not—prove

The strength comes from the intersection of names, family relationships, ages, place, and the enslaver’s record—not from any one clue in isolation. Even then, each transcription should be checked against the original image when possible because names, dates, and handwriting can be misread.

The published evidence supports the family connection described here. It does not automatically identify every unnamed person in the 1860 schedule, prove which surviving building each person occupied, or resolve every earlier generation.

Those questions require separate evidence and should remain open when the record remains open.