Family Papers
by Angela Spivey
As she sorted the yellowed pages, Laura Knodel stopped to read. "Morganton/11 o'clock at night/July 8th 1863," began the letter from William Waightstill Avery. "My dear Father, No letters or private telegrams arrived tonight, but the telegrams in the papers, whilst announcing a decided victory for our army at Gettysburg on Sunday the 5th, contains very sad distressing news for our family/ The papers state that Col Avery of N.C. was killed — it must be either Molton or Isaac — one of your beloved sons has fallen I fear."
The Averys had their share of tragedy — only one of five sons survived the Civil War. But they were fortunate in other ways. "They were a powerful family in so many arenas — politics to law to business to agriculture," says Knodel, who graduated in May 2004 with dual master's degrees in library science from Carolina and public history from N.C. State University. While working as a research assistant at Carolina's Wilson Library, Knodel was assigned to reorganize the Southern Historical Collection's documents on the family. She found their stories fascinating, and when she learned that the collection had never been publicly exhibited, she decided to change that.
Knodel chose thirty-two documents and three photos to display in Wilson. "The Avery Family of North Carolina" exhibit ran in the Manuscripts Department in early 2004. The documents are actually divided into two collections — the papers of the Avery family of North Carolina and those of Alphonso Avery. The single son who survived the Civil War, Alphonso was a judge and served on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Later he led the law school at Trinity College, which eventually became Duke University.
The papers also show the varying attitudes that people held about slavery in the nineteenth century. In one document, John Motley Morehead, governor of North Carolina from 1841 to 1845, deeds two slaves to his daughter and her new groom, William Waightstill Avery. The tone of the letter struck Knodel. "They are moving these people around — changing people's lives — but it's treated as simply a dry business transaction," she says. But in another letter, a business associate of the Averys writes that slavery is "a great political, as well as moral, evil." He asks to buy back some slaves that he had sold to Isaac Avery and says that he plans to emancipate them and send them to Liberia, Africa.
The Southern Historical Collection has held parts of the Avery family papers since 1940 and acquired additions to it over the years. Working part time over two months, Knodel cataloged the whole collection. She put the papers in chronological order and wrote two online finding aids — descriptions and summaries of the contents of the dozen or so cartons of papers.
Though the exhibit is over, if you visit the Manuscripts Department in Wilson Library, you can dig through the Avery collection and the papers of many other families.
Learn more about the Southern Historical Collection online at http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/shcabout.html.
A manuscripts research tutorial is at http://www.lib.unc.edu/instruct/manuscripts/.
