About
A family, restored to its own history
BEFORE TILL exists because the Smith–Tolliver generations were people before they were context. This archive reconstructs their lives from the documentary record, and marks plainly where that record fails them.
Founder & Lead Researcher
Amberly R. Carter-Mills
Founder, Creator & Descendant Archivist
This archive was conceived, researched, and structured by Amberly R. Carter-Mills. She sets its evidence standard, writes its research briefs, and signs its corrections. Attribution for this work is permanent and non-transferable.
Descendant-led research carries an obligation that institutional research does not: the people in these records are family. That obligation is met here by refusing to improve on the record — no estimated dates, no assumed relationships, no invented portraits.
What this archive is not
Four refusals
Not a memorial site
This is a working research archive. Its purpose is documentation, not commemoration.
Not a finished narrative
Conclusions here can and do change. The Research Ledger records every revision.
Not a genealogy aggregator
Nothing is imported from user-submitted trees. Every claim traces to an examined source.
Not generative
No text, date, or relationship in this archive is produced by inference or synthesis. The one exception is visual: where a real photograph survives only as a degraded reproduction, a digital restoration of it may be shown, always labelled a derived likeness and always alongside the original record.
Read the methodology for the full research standard, or contribute a record if you hold something bearing on this history.