Juda "Judy" Williams

Robert Stafford (1790-1877) of Cumberland Island, Georgia, had two extralegal wives (slaves). The first liason began in about 1839 and was life-long. ... The second liaison may have begun about 1850 or so. Apparently the slave was named Judy. Two daughters were born. The elder was named Cornelia. The younger, named Nanette or Nannie, was born on Cumberland Island, June 20, 1854. They were brought up in New Jersey by a white man named George E. Webb, his wife Eliza, and their daughter Sarah E. Webb. Sarah Webb was mentor and tutor to her charges; and she grew especially fond of the younger daughter, Nanette. Judging from Stafford’s funding of the first family, reason exists to suppose Stafford also financially aided his second family.

From Frau Doktor Nancy Stafford of Georgia: From Slave to Physician By Mary R. Bullard and Tracy Moxhay Castle. The African Diaspora Archeology Network: March 2009 Newsletter.

At the date when Stafford took up with “Judy”, he was approaching sixty years of age. Although he treated his Bernardey family quite differently from the way he handled Judy’s children, Stafford went to considerable trouble for both his slave families to endow each with civil, denominational, and financial rights. They could be educated only if they found civil freedom from slavery. He backed up his beliefs by making wise investments based upon his profits from slave labor.

At the beginning of the nineteenth-century Cumberland Island had only a few plantation units One of them was called Rayfield. Juda was a Rayfield plantation slave. We think she may have been a slave belonging to the Greene family. In 1813 Catharine (Greene) Miller listed in her will a female slave named “Juda.” Juda was among the thirty slaves Mrs. Miller was devising to her grandchildren, offspring of her son Nathaniel, who was to inherit Rayfield Plantation on Cumberland. Nat having resolutely declined to receive human beings as property, his mother devised them instead to his children.

Juda’s next appearance in the Cumberland records was in connection with the 1834 sale of Rayfield Plantation by Nat Greene to Robert Stafford. Although her name “Juda” was spelled differently this time, it was the same woman, for in each slave inventory she appeared in a list containing what appears to be a nuclear family. The name Juda, perhaps African in origin, was not common on Cumberland Island.13 If she was about nine years old in 1834 (the Rayfield sale date), she would have been in her twenties in the 1850s, the decade which held Nancy’s presumed birth-date. Although born on a Cumberland plantation, the two little girls resided with their mother. Wherever she moved, they moved too. We think Juda was Stafford’s plantation nurse. Cumberland was an isolated place. Getting medical help there had always been difficult.

Although she did not appear on Glynn County’s tax lists as slave property owned by Stafford, Juda may have been leased out to work on her own, a common hiring device in antebellum days.16 After the end of the war we think she moved to Brunswick (Georgia) where she may have had relatives. In 1870 there was a Judah [sic] Williams, age 61, living there with her farmer husband, James Williams. She gave “nurse” as her occupation. This Williams couple lived outside the present-day Brunswick, in what is known today as the Pennick area. She died before 1887.17

• Frau Doktor Nancy Stafford of Georgia: From Slave to Physician By Mary R. Bullard and Tracy Moxhay Castle. The African Diaspora Archeology Network: March 2009 Newsletter.
  • 12 The 1880 U.S. census gave Cornelia’s birthplace in Florida. According to her U.S. passport, Cornelia was born on Cumberland Island. Quite possibly Cornelia was uncertain where the island was.
  • 13 Records of Camden County, Georgia [RCCG], Will Bk. “A”: 122-128. Will of Catharine Miller. Will dated 2 September 1814. Will recorded 12 April 1815; RCCG, Deed of sale of land [Rayfield] and Negroes. By N. R. Greene and his children, to Robert Stafford. Deed Bk. “M”: 191-194. Dated 2 April 1834. Recorded 27 May 1834. N.R. Greene testified that his mother had devised slave property of hers to his children, not to him.
  • 14 “Dr. D.S. Lamb in his History of the Howard Medical School, supplemented by statements of her personal friends in Washington, has in it elements of unusual interest. Nannette W. Stafford, born in Brunswick, Ga., in 1853 ...”
  • 15 Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2004), 46.
  • 16 This process, called “self-hire” in antebellum days, granted a limited amount of freedom to qualified slaves. See Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Harvard University Press: Cambridge and London, 2004).
  • 17 Statement by Nancy Stafford to marriage register (1887).
• Cumberland Island Researchers Aid
• Reference: FamilySearch Family Tree - SmartCopy: Oct 3 2016, 22:21:19 UTC
• page 317 of Robert Stafford of Cumberland Island: Growth of a Planter By Mary Ricketson Bullard