Spent today sharing research about the family of #Nashville's William Edmondson with documentary film makers. He was a descendant of @FortNegley (his father died building it) and the first African-American folk art sculptor w/his own exhibition at MoMA @MuseumModernArt.
@FortNegley@MuseumModernArt With help from Krista Castillo at @FortNegley, our team collated various Union Army labor documentation & found some more of his relatives, and those of the man who raised him- Orange Edmondson, as well as some of the others who were enslaved by his enslaver.
@FortNegley@MuseumModernArt William Edmondson is a son of Edgehill, one of our oldest African American neighborhoods. The city failed to respect and retain his works of art. Now the Edmondson home site behind the Edgehill Library is working hard to make sure everyone knows his name and life's work.
(Also, I'm aware that research done by others here have found his father, Orange, alive and well after the Civil War. The Union Officers in charge of supervising the builders of Nashville's defenses have listed him as dead before April 1, 1863. They created a certificate!)
I can't wait to see if there's more evidence that can untangle this mystery.
Still untangling! Thanks to @DrEFleming7, @AuntB has joined the fray, and the documentary filmmakers are confirming with their research. Orange appears on 4 different documents under 2 enrollment numbers. If William's father *and* grandfather were named Orange, we may have bingo.
Spent my Saturday at the Tennessee Central Railway Museum, with their archivist Carter Newton. He's indexing their employment records and finding about 20% of the employees from the early 20th century were Black, from neighborhoods around @FortNegley.
What does that mean? It means another source of records from the laborers who built @FortNegley, the soldiers who defended it in the Battle of Nashville, and their descendants who remained in the area after the war!
He's generously allowing my research assistant to come in to extract the people, places, events & dates from each file to add to our database so we'll have one more valuable source of information about people who weren't in the position to leave behind much written material.