Her interest in family history began in 1994. She was passionate about discovering her ancestral roots and her heritage. In hopes of finding relatives she had never met, she set out to find them. The desire to preserve family stories for future generations also motivated her quest for knowledge.
She discovered that Robert Harrell, her 4th Great-Grandfather, and his family signed a Freedmen Labor Contract in 1866. For many African Americans, the Freedmen Labor Contract marked the transition from slavery to paid labor.Robert and his family became sharecroppers until they saved enough money to purchase land in 1888. During the Reconstruction era, it represented an early attempt to establish legal and economic rights for newly freed individuals. To receive accommodation, tools, and supplies, Robert Harrell and his family signed this contract. There were many African Americans who were forced to work on plantations without pay.
As she researched her family history, she discovered sharecropping, peonage, and involuntary servitude. She had not studied peonage or sharecropping in school, but Harrell was determined to learn more. To find records about the subjects, she travels to clerk offices, attics, vaults, libraries, and the National Archives. Over the course of her investigation, she interviewed African Americans held in bondage in the Deep South after 1865.
A new form of slavery was created through the peonage system for hundreds of thousands of newly freed African-Americans. Mae Louise Walls Miller and her brother Arthur Walls recounted harrowing tales of backbreaking labor on the farm. The harsh realities of these oppressive systems were brought to life by individuals such as Johnny Lee Gaddy, Louis Allen, and others. ~ Antoinette Harrell