The current DavenportFam working tree reaches into nineteenth-century Georgia. It places Wiley J. Strickland’s birth in 1856 and Dinah Hawkins’s birth in 1861, and it identifies earlier Watkins, Strickland, Hawkins and Newton relatives with estimated births mainly in the 1820s through 1840s. Those entries are research leads, not a completed proof chain. Several relationships, locations and slavery-era household connections still require source-level confirmation.

That means we cannot responsibly place a named Strickland, Hawkins, Watkins or Newton ancestor at a Georgia courthouse, plantation, battlefield or church in 1776. We cannot call a specific person a Patriot, Loyalist, refugee or enslaved laborer merely because a later descendant lived in Georgia or carried a familiar surname.

But that limitation does not make 1776 irrelevant to the family. It gives us a more precise question: What kind of state was Georgia building in 1776, and how did that state create the legal, geographic and archival world in which our known ancestors later appear?

A surviving Georgia government account from March 10–19, 1776 brings the contradiction close enough to read line by line. Military agent Levi Sheftall submitted charges for beef, rice, pork, rum and other provisions used during the colony’s revolutionary mobilization. White officers appear by name. The Black people doing military labor do not.

The account records groups of 32, 49 and 50 Black laborers “working on the intrenchments.” Separate entries provide food for overseers who were “minding” them. Other unnamed Black workers carried provisions, cooked and moved through the military landscape around Savannah and nearby defensive points. The record measures food, labor and supervision. It does not record the workers’ names, families, ages, origins or choices.[1]

This is not proof that any person in the Strickland or Hawkins lines was among those workers. It is something different and still important: a contemporary example of how Georgia’s revolutionary government used Black labor while preserving a paper system that made white officials individually visible and Black workers collectively anonymous.

That archival pattern matters to genealogy. Descendants often encounter a frustrating wall before 1870 and assume the family vanished. The people did not vanish. The record system frequently refused to name them.

The Declaration of Independence announced equality as a political principle while the colonies continued to treat human beings as property. An earlier draft included a passage attacking the slave trade. Congress removed it. Thomas Jefferson later wrote that South Carolina and Georgia objected because they wished the trade to continue; the Library of Congress preserves the draft and the history of that deletion.[2]

Georgia adopted a state constitution in 1777 and organized a government independent of the British Crown.[3] Independence changed who exercised political sovereignty. It did not abolish slavery, give Black Georgians equal citizenship or require the new state to identify the people whose labor supported it.

For the family’s later Black Georgia lines, then, 1776 was not a freedom date. It was a transfer of political authority inside a society that continued to protect slavery. That is more exact than saying simply that “America was hypocritical.” The state created republican institutions and preserved racial bondage at the same time.

The geography is as important as the law. A 1776 map of the southern British colonies does not show Clarke, Madison, Oglethorpe or Oconee Counties because none of them yet existed.[4] The land later associated with the family sat inside a changing borderland shaped by Muscogee and Cherokee sovereignty, colonial claims, war and post-Revolution white settlement.

Clarke County was created in 1801 from Jackson County. Madison County was created in 1811. Oglethorpe County dates to 1793, and Oconee County was not created from western Clarke until 1875.[5][6] A record that says “Clarke County” in 1850 therefore cannot simply be projected backward to 1776. The same ground passed through different political jurisdictions, and some of the county names central to our genealogy were products of the post-Revolution expansion of Georgia.

This changes the research strategy. Searching only under modern county names will miss earlier deeds, grants, tax lists, church records and probate files. It can also erase the Indigenous history of the land by making later county boundaries look timeless.

The Revolution did not have one outcome for every Black person. War disrupted slavery. British and Patriot forces both seized enslaved people as property and labor. Black Georgians also acted for themselves: some escaped plantations, searched for separated relatives, joined British forces in exchange for promised freedom, created independent communities or found temporary economic space in occupied Savannah.

A scholarly Georgia history estimates that roughly 5,000 of the colony’s approximately 15,000 enslaved people escaped bondage during the wartime upheaval. Some reached freedom or exile; others were captured, forcibly relocated or returned to slavery when the plantation order was restored.[7]

Those numbers describe Revolutionary Georgia, not this family. Until a named ancestor or tightly supported collateral household is found in an evacuation list, military record, petition, probate file or church register, we must not convert a statewide possibility into a family story. Still, the history tells us what kinds of records and movements to look for.

By the time the current working tree begins naming people in these lines, Georgia had expanded inland, created new counties and deepened a plantation economy dependent on enslaved labor. The births now attributed to Nancy Watkins, Collins Watkins, Samuel Eberhart Strickland, Chaney Watkins, Thomas Hawkins and Polly Newton fall after the Revolution. Wiley and Dinah were born before the Civil War ended.

Those working-tree entries do not yet prove each person’s slavery-era legal status or identify a particular enslaver household. Under Georgia law, the status of a child followed the mother, which makes the maternal evidence especially important. But the family still needs the documents that connect a named woman to a specific pre-emancipation household and then bridge her into postwar records.

The careful conclusion is therefore layered. Documented: the known family record is centered in nineteenth-century Georgia, and Wiley and Dinah were born before abolition. Documented context: Georgia’s Revolution preserved slavery and relied on unnamed Black labor. Strong inference: the political and land systems created after independence shaped the counties, labor markets and archives in which the family later appears. Unresolved: the identities, locations and legal status of the family’s eighteenth-century predecessors.

The 1776 Sheftall account shows how an archive can be detailed and still conceal people. It gives quantities of rice and beef, dates, work assignments, officer names and payment totals. Yet dozens of Black workers appear only as a number and a racial label.

That is not a neutral omission. Government and property records were designed to protect transactions, authority and ownership. They often named enslavers, officers, creditors, heirs and buyers while recording Black people as labor groups, first names, ages, valuations or unnamed property.

A serious family publication should make that bias visible. The goal is not to fill every blank with a dramatic story. It is to show readers why the blank exists, what evidence might cross it, and where certainty must stop.

This article produces a concrete research agenda rather than a symbolic conclusion.

1. Build a line-by-line proof table for the earliest Watkins, Strickland, Hawkins and Newton ancestors: name variants, estimated birth, first secure record, county as recorded, predecessor county and source image.

2. Separate verified relationships from working-tree relationships. Chaney Watkins’s connection to Wiley, the identity of Wiley’s father, and the Hawkins/Newton slavery-era households require explicit evidence review.

3. Search backward through county changes. For every nineteenth-century family location, identify the governing county at earlier dates before searching deeds, taxes, probate, church and court material.

4. Mine probate and tax records for named and unnamed Black people, then compare ages, family groupings, neighbors and post-1865 surnames. A surname match alone is not proof.

5. Search Revolutionary and early-state records for the broader local networks—not to manufacture an eighteenth-century ancestor, but to test whether a defensible bridge can be built.

The most useful contribution is not a general memory about “where the family came from.” We need an item that can move one line across the documentary gap.

Please look for a family Bible page, funeral program, obituary, church record, deed, tax receipt, pension paper, letter or old research note that names Chaney Watkins, Nancy or Collins Watkins, Samuel Strickland, Thomas Hawkins, Polly Newton, or any of their parents. Especially valuable would be a document that gives a pre-1870 place, a parent’s name, a former surname, an employer or landowner, a church, or a neighboring family.

A single named relationship or location could tell us which county records to search next. That is how the family gets closer to 1776: not by pretending the gap is solved, but by finding the next document that narrows it.

[1] Digital Library of Georgia, “[Account between the state of] Georgia and Levi Sheftall, 1776 Mar. 10–19,” original manuscript and transcription: https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_zlna_tcc824

[2] Library of Congress, “First Printed Version of the Declaration of Independence — Slavery,” including the deleted passage and Jefferson’s account of the deletion: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/interactives/declaration-of-independence/slavery/enlarge5-transcribe.html

[3] Georgia Archives / Digital Library of Georgia, Constitution of the State of Georgia, 1777: https://dlg.usg.edu/record/gaarchives_adhoc_2803

[4] Bernard Romans, “A general map of the Southern British colonies in America,” 1776, Digital Library of Georgia: https://dlg.usg.edu/record/guan_hmap_hmap1776r6copy2

[5] Georgia Department of Archives and History, Georgia Counties: Their Changing Boundaries: https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/api/collection/p17154coll12/id/142/download

[6] New Georgia Encyclopedia, “Clarke County,” including county formation and boundary changes: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/counties-cities-neighborhoods/clarke-county/

[7] Timothy J. Lockley, “Slavery in Revolutionary Georgia,” New Georgia Encyclopedia: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/slavery-in-revolutionary-georgia/

Lead visual: crop of the March 1776 Georgia account showing Black laborers and overseers in the entrenchment entries, with a caption explaining that the people are unnamed and are not claimed as relatives.

Map: the 1776 southern-colonies map beside a modern northeast Georgia county map, with later family counties labeled by creation date rather than falsely drawn as 1776 boundaries.

Timeline: 1776 Georgia account → 1777 state constitution → 1793 Oglethorpe County → 1801 Clarke County → 1811 Madison County → 1856 Wiley’s working birth date → 1861 Dinah’s working birth date → 1865 abolition → 1870 first federal census naming formerly enslaved people broadly.