If there is a “center of the universe” for our family, it has to be Wilcox County, Alabama. It seems that more of our ancestors migrated (ESCAPED is more like it) from Wilcox County than from any other place on earth. And a few of them still live there; God bless ‘em!
My daddy, I’m told, left strict orders that when he died he was not to be taken back to Wilcox County. He left there in the 1920’s, I think (He and my mother appear in the 1930 Census records of Baldwin County, Alabama.) and only went back for the occasional funeral or reunion.
Living anywhere in The South, in those days, was hard for our folks; but, judging from the sheer number of people who left to find opportunities elsewhere, it must have been exceptionally difficult to eke out a living in Wilcox.
Most of our people were farmers, but few of them ever owned a farm. After plantation slavery, sharecropping seems to have been the norm.
Workin' in The Field
