A free Black family of Tidewater Virginia — founded by a 1799 act of emancipation, carried forward through generations of farmers, laborers, and dreamers, from Isle of Wight to Virginia Beach to Norfolk and beyond.
From the 1799 manumission that founded the free Black Joyner family to the present day. Each generation built on the last — horses and cattle, farmland and labor, then the move east to the cities.
Click any person to open their full profile. Two lines meet in Marcus Joyner: the free Joyners of Isle of Wight, and the formerly enslaved Wright-Ridley-Davis women of North Carolina who raised him.
From Adolphus and May Ridley — born in slavery, freed in 1865 — through the Wright and Davis women of Granville and Vance County, to the three generations who raised Marcus: his great-grandmother Lucille, his grandmother Millie, and his mother Stacey.
Profiles of the ancestors whose stories we've pieced together from census records, tax lists, wills, and family memory.
The story continues. From Norfolk to Virginia Beach to the Pacific Northwest, the family carries forward the freedom first won in 1799.
Every claim on this site is grounded in real records. Here are the primary sources behind the story.
Documents, artifacts, and scenes from the world our family lived in — from the 1802 Tynes will to the farm life of Tidewater Virginia and North Carolina.
Beyond dates and census lines — who they were as citizens: taxpayers, registered voters, church members, lodge brothers and sisters, community builders. Each claim here is tagged Verified or Lead with its source.