RLP 360: “The Indigo Girl” – Eliza Lucas Pinckney in 18th Century South Carolina

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 360, The Indigo Girl – Eliza Lucas Pinckney in 18th Century South Carolina.

Nicole (41s):
Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hello. Hello. Hi Mom, how are you?

Diana (50s):
Hi Nicole. I’m doing well. How about you?

Nicole (53s):
Doing great. I have been getting ready to start my research, and kind of research planning, and I got really hung up today on this record and I realized I don’t need to figure this out right now. After I figured it out that it wasn’t related to my family, it was the situation of people with the same name and I felt like before I could move forward on anything, I was like, I have to figure out if this belongs to my family or not. I realized that I was getting kind of sidetracked with these Ancestry hints.

Diana (1m 26s):
Ah,

Nicole (1m 27s):
And Ancestry hints is not what I wanted to do in my research plan, I knew where they lived, I knew their names and ages and even though Reeves is a common name, ’cause I’m tracing Sally Reeves’s children forward and one of her sons is William Reeves, and there was this Confederate service record and it was for William E. Reeves, which was the same middle initial. Then there was also an administration of a William E. Reeves’ estate and they’re all in Arkansas in counties that are nearby each other and they were all kind of in the hints and I, and someone had attached it to their tree, anyway, so I just felt like, oh, I just need to know if this is the right one or not.

Nicole (2m 8s):
And anyway, so after doing that I thought, you know, that’s kind of a waste of time. It’s better to just really focus on what I, what my actual starting point is, ignoring those hints and then making my actual research plan based on what I know and going to the next step instead of jumping all over the place with like looking at these Ancestry hints. So it was kind of good job kind of a, just an eye-opening moment of time wasting things that we sometimes do when we’re trying to research plan.

Diana (2m 40s):
That is so interesting. It is really easy to get sidetracked when you discover a new person or a new record and then you just wanna go down that rabbit hole, you know, even if you’ve got your objective and you’re on task. And so I think that can pop up anytime in the research process.

Nicole (2m 56s):
Right. And I can’t even remember why I was looking at the hints or, or you know, I’ve been looking at some trees of DNA matches too and, but sometimes I just feel like I can’t close something down on my Chrome browser until I’ve decided if I’m going to log it or if I’m going to like ignore it because I know it’s the wrong person. If I am undecided about who it belongs to, then I’m like, oh, what should I do? And I, looking back, I’m like, I should have just left it there in the hints for later.

Diana (3m 27s):
Yes. Oh my goodness. Well I’m glad you’re making progress. It’s always fun to get going on a project and get your research plan done.

Nicole (3m 35s):
Yeah, it is. The challenge with this one is so many different localities, you know, they went from Gibson County, Tennessee to DeSoto County, Mississippi, then over to Fulton County, Arkansas, and then to Izard County, Arkansas, which I had to Marco Polo you yesterday and tell you Izard County, Arkansas, that’s where your research is, so that was funny.

Diana (3m 56s):
Yeah, well if it’s before 1889, your research plan will be really simple ’cause there are no county records until then, it’ll be tax records and federal land and census records.

Nicole (4m 8s):
Thanks for doing that part of my plan for me, it is before 1889. ,

Diana (4m 10s):
Okay, well you’ll be hitting this tax records.

Nicole (4m 14s):
Yeah, I’ll have to do that. Thanks for the tip.

Diana (4m 18s):
I’ve had a lot of experience in that area, both with Fulton and Izard County and they’re burned county-ness, if that’s a word, dealing with the lack of records for when I want them.

Nicole (4m 30s):
Yeah, it is frustrating. Alright, well announcements are that on Tuesday June 10th, we have our next Research Like a Pro webinar. It will be presented by one of our podcast listeners, Beth Snyder, and she’ll be talking about discovering the Schrader family through a family reunion photograph. This will be a unique and different presentation that actually talks about researching the people within a family reunion photo. The description is that Lawrence and Leona Salsow , this is Beth’s husband’s great-grandparents, had an old picture among their belongings from a family reunion. They also had a numbered list of the names and an overlay of the picture with a number of each person in the photo. The original research objective was to determine how everyone was related and when the picture was made.

Nicole (5m 13s):
And Beth ended up meeting a new cousin who helped her with her research and she named him as a co-researcher on the report. He did additional work, which is not in the report, but which took the line back a couple more generations. So the topics will include Nebraska, Census Records, Old Photos. So that will be fun. The next study group begins August 27th. So if you’re thinking about joining us in the Research Like a Pro study group, then get ready to register beginning May 21st. The registration will end August 21st. So actually at the time of the recording, this registration hasn’t started yet, but by the time this is released, registration will be open. So you can go ahead and register if you’re listening now, and you’ll have all summer to register until August 21st when we close it it up and then we get started right after that.

Nicole (5m 59s):
If you’d like to join us as a peer group leader, please email us and let us know. And we’d usually ask you to send a research report that you’ve done. Our newsletter comes out every Monday, so if you don’t sign up for that, you’ll be missing out on all of our new posts and podcast episodes and coupons, upcoming conferences in just a couple weeks where we’ll be starting the Texas Institute of Genealogical Research course that I’m m coordinating and Mom is teaching and it’s integrating AI into Genealogical Research and Writing June 16th through the 20th. And we’re really looking forward to that and students will be bringing a piece of their own writing to it and using that as a starting point for more research, for editing our writing, for turning our writing into other types of writing and doing all kinds of fun things, including an entire day on transcription.

Diana (6m 45s):
Well, I’m certainly looking forward to that and learning from everyone. I love hearing how different people use AI in their work because there are so many uses for it and sometimes our brain just hasn’t thought of what we could do. So that will be really fun. Well, our topic for the day is Eliza Lucas Pinckney, and she is the subject of a really interesting book that I read. And this book is titled The Indigo Girl by Natasha Boyd and its historical fiction. So she’s taken a real character in history and then fictionalized her story based on a lot of research. And I had never heard of Eliza Lucas Pinkney, but she is credited with learning to grow the difficult crop of indigo in South Carolina in the early 1700s.

Diana (7m 34s):
And this was a difficult task. And as you can imagine, especially for a woman in colonial America. So if you don’t know anything about Eliza or Indigo or Charlestown, South Carolina in the early 1700s, the book is really great at giving you some insight into the plight of a woman in this time. And Eliza was remarkable. She was born in 1722 to George and Ann Lucas on the island of Colonial British Antigua, where Lucas served as lieutenant governor. Her parents sent her to England for her education and that was where she developed a love of botany.

Diana (8m 14s):
So when her father moved her family to the low country near Charleston, South Carolina, about 1738, she was a young woman at that time and with her mother’s death soon after they arrived in the colony and her father’s departure for Antigua soon after, she was left with the management of three plantations and the enslaved workers. Well her interest in botany became apparent with her desire to plant more than rice and she experimented with seeds her father sent her from the Caribbean islands. At this time, indigo was very, very valuable in the Caribbean islands, but no one had been able to figure out how to really grow it successfully in South Carolina.

Diana (8m 56s):
And she persisted with the difficult task of growing indigo and then extracting the dye, which was a laborious process, especially in the heat and humidity.

Nicole (9m 7s):
The humidity just sounds really uncomfortable. And coming from Arizona where it’s dry heat, it’s uncomfortable in the heat anyway. So adding humidity makes it hard, especially if you have to do something difficult like extracting dye from indigo. Eliza came to know Charles Pinckney and his wife, Elizabeth Lamb Pinckney, through their association with Charlestown society. Although twenty years her senior, when Elizabeth died, Charles married Eliza and had four children with her. Then Charles died in 1758 of malaria, and following his death, Eliza continued to manage the plantation work while raising their children. Because of Eliza’s success with indigo, other Lowcountry planters followed suit, and by the Revolution, indigo comprised a third of South Carolina’s exports.

Nicole (10m 6s):
Eliza died at age 71 in 1793 of breast cancer and her family buried her in Philadelphia. The National Park Service has an article on their website about Eliza, And it says, Eliza Lucas Pinckney left a lasting legacy in the Lowcountry. In 1989, Eliza was the first woman inducted into the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame, for her contributions to agriculture and economic growth. In 2008, she was inducted in the South Carolina Hall of Fame. So that was really cool that she was the first woman to be inducted into that South Carolina Business Hall of Fame. And she was finally recognized for her huge contribution to the economy of the south. And so it wasn’t until 1989, 200 years after she died, that she was recognized for that.

Diana (10m 51s):
It’s so interesting, and I love it when people do the research and then write these books so that we can learn about them because otherwise, you know, we would not be aware of our contributions. And it’s always interesting to me to learn about women in colonial era because of how difficult it was for them to do anything like this. And so its just wonderful to read about someone who really persevered and was able to make a big contribution.

Nicole (11m 19s):
Well, it’s just crazy to think back and you know, this is the early 1700s and the colonies were very young still, and how, you know, she was even sent back to England for her education and then they settled, you know, Charleston. It’s just crazy to imagine what life would’ve been like back then in South Carolina.

Diana (11m 42s):
Exactly.

Nicole (11m 43s):
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Nicole (12m 24s):
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Diana (12m 37s):
Thank you. Well, of course, as I am reading this book, I am always wondering what are the sources and how much of this is real and where is the author getting all this information? And one of the really neat things about Eliza and I think you know, is perhaps not always possible with every subject of a historical fiction book, but she actually left behind letter books that describe her life up until the mid 1760s. And so after that, historians turned to newspaper articles and writings of her friends and family to learn about her later years. But based on those letter books, you know, that is a source written from her all about her life.

Diana (13m 21s):
There have been a lot of people writing about Eliza. There are biographies, there’s children’s fiction, and Natasha Boyd, the author of Indigo Girl, uses those letters throughout the book, bringing her to life. So the author writes, “Now, I realize I am not a historian. But I do know that there once lived a remarkable girl whose name, outside of Charleston, has mostly been forgotten.

Diana (14m 3s):
And the need to tell her story became so overwhelming that I couldn’t ignore it. I told myself that if I could tell her story in such a way as to capture her spirit and her fire, and introduce her back into our consciousness, then I must try.” Well, what is this letter book of Eliza Lucas Pinkney? It’s dated 1739 to 1762. And when I first read about it, I really had no idea what a letter book was, but this gives us insight into her character and you know, think she’s just doing day to day her thoughts and really all of that set the foundation for the book The Indigo Girl. So it has been published, her letter book, and the introduction states, “one legacy of Eliza’s educational breadth is this published letter book itself. Her handwritten letter book served as a record of drafts of outgoing communications, brief memoranda of them, and copies of finished letters.

Diana (14m 46s):
This unique volume offers today’s reader a rare opportunity to come vis-a-vis a woman in colonial America.” So I thought that was just fascinating and I would actually love to get a copy of that letter book, you know, that’s been published and read in her own words. So you know, how many times do you Nicole write a letter? I mean, now we write emails all the time, but you know, I never wrote a draft of a letter. I would just write the letter. But you know, she was working in a business sense and maybe she just wanted to make sure she had the right information. I don’t know, I just think that’s fascinating.

Nicole (15m 25s):
Wow, that is cool. I’ve never seen one and what a unique historical source and what a delight to be the historian who gets to dive into that and create the story of Eliza’s life.

Diana (15m 37s):
Exactly. Well, and then of course if you’re writing a story, you’ve gotta fill in with context because the letters are not going to tell everything that you need for a book. So the author did a lot of historical research just in the era and the location to to know just to learn about things so she could actually write those. And it’s fun because she does have a Instagram account where she shows a sampling of her research process. So I always am curious to see what other people do for their research process, especially someone like an author who’s doing something really large in scope. And so I was fascinated to see that she had created a timeline, just much like we do in our own genealogy research.

Diana (16m 20s):
And she researched historical records, maps, clothing, and importantly the process of growing indigo and producing its blue dye because that is, you know, the trademark of of Eliza is this blue dye and this indigo. So you can go to her Instagram account @eliza.the_indigo_girl and see all the pictures. And I have a link in the blog post of that. But I would recommend doing that because it’s just really fun to see what things look like, you know, what kind of clothes they wore and where they were. Natasha Boyd, the author, also researched on site and I think that’s so important to go immerse yourself in the place if you’re going to write an entire, you know, book about someone.

Diana (17m 7s):
And she had gone to an indigo exhibit and they actually had at this time an Eliza Lucas Pinkney exhibit in Charleston. So she was able to really immerse herself in the culture of the time. And this ran in 2023, the exhibit, but there is an article where we can see a photos of Eliza’s actual dress and shoes. So they have preserved those, which is amazing. And so it’s fun to look and see what she wore and you know, just get a real flavor for this woman. The dress, if you can imagine, was saved and was donated in 1940 by a direct descendant.

Diana (17m 49s):
So I dunno that I know of very many pieces of clothing that have survived that long. So that’s really neat. And the museum also has a video that can walk you through the story. So even though they don’t have the exhibit up anymore, they’ve got things online that you can watch and learn more about her.

Nicole (18m 7s):
That’s fantastic. I was just looking at the Instagram page that you suggested and I think it has an image of one of her dresses because it’s a link to the Charleston Museum that has the collection there. So that’s really neat. Well, let’s expand this idea of reading about an important historical figure to apply it to our own writing of our family stories. Natasha Boyd’s book provides an example of how we can write our family stories through her immersion in Eliza’s life. Imagine if you visited a blacksmith shop and spent a day doing the work there. You’d certainly have new insight into that ancestor.

Nicole (18m 48s):
What can we learn from studying the community of our ancestors? What did they wear? What did they eat? How did they travel? Our ancestors may not have left letters, diaries, or even many records of their lives, but with enough research and context we can reconstruct a probable reality for them. And with Eliza, she left behind a wonderful source, a letter book, and often the sources left behind by the neighbors and the relatives and the community of our ancestors can be used to help reconstruct that reality of when they lived. It’s important to expand our research focus to include others in the community.

Diana (19m 28s):
Oh, I wholeheartedly agree. I love what you said about how our ancestors may not have left anything, but maybe the neighbor who lived right next to them kept a journal or kept a diary or wrote letters and someone has preserved that. So I think it’s just really neat to read a lot of, in my case I like to read a lot of books, but you know, anything you can read that gives you ideas and and serve as an inspiration for writing your own family history, I think is really wonderful. You can get a sense of what you like and what you don’t like. You know, do you wanna have it be strictly historical so that you don’t have any fictionalization, you know, putting words into your ancestors’ mouth or do you wanna write it as fiction?

Diana (20m 11s):
I know I’ve done several little blog posts, my Adventures of Cowboy Bob series, all about my dad, where I actually did fictionalize and created dialogue for him and his siblings and his parents. And it was really fun. But I felt comfortable doing that because I had heard him tell these stories from his own mouth and I knew my grandpa and how he spoke, And so I could really envision how they would’ve said things, even though of course I don’t know for sure. I just was able to put that into the story and I thought it would make it more readable for like his descendants. So you know, I think just depending on who our readers are going to be might determine how we want to write.

Diana (20m 51s):
But in any case, we’re always going to want to do that contextual research and try to learn as much as we can about the place and time to make it as realistic as possible.

Nicole (21m 2s):
Absolutely. And then if we want to add any kind of illustrations, maps, photos, drawings, that kind of thing, we need to know more about that historical and geographic context so that we can find the appropriate illustrations. And one fun thing that we can do now is we can ask artificial intelligence image generators to create illustrations that can go along with our family stories. And my daughter, who’s 11, has been working on creating some illustrations for a family story that I gave her for Christmas. I gave her a binder with stories about brave women in her family, which is kind of an expansion upon the Brave Women book I gave her when she was five. So it had some new themes in it with things she was interested in.

Nicole (21m 43s):
Now that she’s almost a teenager and she was bored one day when she was home sick. So I invited her to come and try using an image generator to make illustrations for one of the brave women’s stories and she has been working on it ever since, even though she’s not sick anymore and she’s back to being busy, she just really enjoys the process and how fun it is to work on creating artistic renderings of her grandmother. So it’s been fun.

Diana (22m 8s):
Oh, that is awesome. I love that. That’s such a great way to think of something to get your child, your daughter, interested in family history. AI, it’s just that’s a great tool. That’s a really fun idea to have them use the image generators to create some illustrations,

Nicole (22m 27s):
Right? My kids have been fascinated with the image generators from AI and this is a good positive use for them. I think a lot of the time kids are like, this is fun to play with, but they don’t know what to make with it besides like, take this picture of me and make me look old, or what did I look like as a baby? Like some of those silly things. Yeah. But this is a much more interesting and fun use.

Diana (22m 49s):
Oh, that’s great. Thanks for sharing that. Well, thanks everyone for listening. I hope you can go checkout the book or at least checkout Eliza Lucas Pinckney and you can go to the blog post. We’ll have that linked to that in the show notes and get to some of those websites that we talked about. It’s just so great to learn about women in our country’s history and their contributions, and Eliza certainly was one I enjoyed learning about, and so hopefully you will too. So thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next time.

Nicole (23m 22s):
Bye

Diana (23m 23s):
Bye-Bye.

Nicole (24m 2s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.