Widby → Woodbey
Date
2024
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Abstract
George Washington Woodbey was a Baptist minister and noted African American lecturer. He traveled widely on the lecture circuit in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, speaking on such subjects as “Why I Believe What I Believe,” “The Negro in Ancient History,” “The Young Negro of the Past and Present,” and “The Negro Schools,” as well as on social, economic, and racial issues in the United States. He was born into slavery in northeastern Tennessee in the mid-1850s and lived most of his childhood there before his parents moved their family to Kansas in 1870.1
This study carefully examines how early records of the Woodbey family in Upper East Tennessee shed light on the lives of its members while they still lived there, and how their experiences there may have contributed to the formation of George Woodbey’s thinking and passionately held convictions.
It begins by attempting to discern the presence of George and his sister Mary and their parents, Charles and Rachel Woodbey, in censuses and other records from slave times, in spite of the fact that those records never give the names of any individual slaves. It then surveys the overall environment in which the members of this family lived and considers some of their recorded experiences in slavery, as well as attempting to imagine what some of the other aspects of their lives may have been like within that context. After attempting to reconstruct how this family experienced the transition from slavery to freedom and the circumstances under which the family came to move from Johnson County to Carter County, still in Upper East Tennessee, it concludes with a brief glimpse of their lives in Carter and Washington Counties.
A fuller survey of their lives during the four years or so that they lived in Carter County, before they moved to Kansas, will appear in a separate study, “Taylor - Woodbey,” because in that period their lives were closely intertwined with those of a White family, the family of Dr. C. C. Taylor. (Studies by others examine the Rev. George W. Woodbey’s adult years, his labors and endeavors, his commitments and convictions, his passions and the causes he championed.)
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Woodbey family, East Tennessee -- history