People
The people the project has traced through the Alabama records — legislators, landowners, a barber, a coach driver, a freed family, and the women the archive barely names. Each page carries its evidence and its silences side by side.
Elizabeth
Manumitted by a special Alabama legislative act in 1820, along with Evelina, Ann, and Shandy. The researcher’s only maternal lead — and the maternity question stays open.
Read her page → c. 1827 – January 1869Columbus Jones
Blacksmith, delegate to the 1867 constitutional convention, and Madison County’s state representative in 1868. His bank register names his whole family.
Read his page → c. 1833 – October 5, 1898Reuben Jones
Blacksmith, state legislator 1872–73, and Huntsville landowner who bought plantation land in January 1871. His bank account names a different father than his brother’s.
Read his page → ? – March 1867Turner Moore
Named as Columbus Jones’s father — and almost nothing else. No record names the white Moore who enslaved him.
Read his page → c. 1816 – 1886Shandy Wesley Jones
Free Black barber of Tuscaloosa and its Reconstruction legislator, 1868–70. Scholarship treats his Madison County and Tuscaloosa records as one life.
Read his page → ? – after 1867Tomietta Jones
Columbus’s wife, named once in his bank register and then lost. The 1870 census is where the search for her begins.
Read her page → 1890 – 1972Dora Jones
Born in Athens, Alabama to formerly enslaved parents; held in unpaid domestic labor for nearly forty years until her case broke in 1947 (she had been discovered in Berkeley in October 1946). Her tie to the Avalon Jones network is unproven — she stands here as a lead and a twentieth-century continuity story.
Read her page → ? – after 1871Anthony & Mary Jones
He signed his own name on an 1871 Southern Claims Commission filing; she lies in the Jones (Mary) Cemetery. Whether they were husband and wife is unconfirmed.
Read their page → ? – February 1859Fortune
Enslaved at Seclusion plantation in Lawrence County — personal servant and coach driver, buried under an eight-foot granite stone raised by his enslaver.
Read his page → ? – after 1876Nancy, Marshall & Zachariah Jones
A freed family of the APJ plantation: Nancy’s 1876 deposition describes farming eighty acres of corn after emancipation; Marshall was the plantation’s “head man”; their likely son Zachariah was denied his federal claim because slavery had denied him literacy.
Read their page → ? – after 1958Willie (Fay) Jones
The man who lost the well: in 1954 the City of Huntsville condemned the well site on his family’s Athens Pike land, and in 1958 he sold the parcel. His siblings carry the land-reclamation fight today.
Read his page → 1872 – 1939Christofer Columbus Jones
Grandson of Columbus Jones, documented at every step from the 1880 census to 1930 — the descendant page that proves the family’s paper trail survived.
Read his page →