A slaveholder’s will distributing enslaved people scattered families across states

Evidence

When he died, he divvied up his slaves and gave them to his children. I wanted to know where each of these children went, as my hunch was they each took my family members with them, wherever they wound up settling. Those were the places where I would focus my research—and hopefully find evidence of how my great-grandfather Renty Taylor Thompson wound up in Alabama. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 396

Categorization

• QUESTION: The will-based dispersal as a mechanism chains a family across geography — directly relevant to the reader’s tracing of how Renty reached Alabama.