But in all her searching of slave inventories, she couldn’t find anyone named Milton. His first enslaver was a planter in Alabama named Pickett.Ĭombing through records online, Karen established that Pickett had owned two cotton plantations, Cedar Grove and Forest Farm, both near Montgomery. As a girl, Karen heard stories about her great-grandfather, who told his children he was born in the 1850s to free people of color in Muscatine, Iowa, but that when he was a child he was kidnapped by slavers and taken with his family down the Mississippi River. Karen Orozco Gutierrez, of Davenport, Iowa, is the great-granddaughter of an enslaved man named Milton Howard, whose life she has long worked to document. These days, descendants of both slaves and slaveholders come to the archives seeking the truth about their past. We were an odd couple, Karen and I, when we first arrived at the Montgomery County Archives in Alabama.
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