The ancestors of the Polk Family, Jim and Amey, their daughter, Judah, and her husband, Kit, along with their children, upon reaching the age of twenty-one), were emancipated in 1840. This occurred one and one-half years after the death of their...
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The ancestors of the Polk Family, Jim and Amey, their daughter, Judah, and her husband, Kit, along with their children, upon reaching the age of twenty-one), were emancipated in 1840. This occurred one and one-half years after the death of their master, plantation owner Thomas Smelly, in Isle of Wight County, Virginia. The newly-freed Smelly family left Virginia that same year, according to the law prohibiting freed slaves to remain in the state more than one year, and migrated to New Jersey. At some point the family changed their name from Smelly to Smiley. In New Jersey, the Smiley family met another freed family from Maryland, the Polks, and the two families intermarried. By 1993, Amey and Jim Smiley had over one hundred descendants. The Smiley-Polk family documents consist of nine holograph 19th-century documents relating to the emancipation of the ancestors of the Smiley-Polk family of New Jersey, and other items concerning the genealogy of this family.
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