Public Beta · Research in progress
About BEFORE TILL
Public memory often begins with Emmett Till in 1955. His family history did not.
What is BEFORE TILL?
An archive that shows its work
BEFORE TILL is a living genealogy and public-history archive reconstructing the Smith–Tolliver family across slavery, emancipation, migration, family memory, and the generations that followed.
It is not a family tree and not a memorial. It is a working research archive: every person, relationship, and conclusion is tied to a cited source and carries an evidence status, and every place the record falls silent is marked as a silence rather than filled in.
Why “BEFORE TILL”?
A family that existed before it was news
The name marks a boundary in public memory, not in the family's life. Generations of this family were born, enslaved, freed, married, buried, moved north, farmed, taught, and worshipped long before a single week in 1955 fixed one of their descendants in the national record.
BEFORE TILL restores that longer history on its own terms. Emmett Till appears here as a descendant of a documented household — one name in a lineage the archive traces backward, not the frame through which everyone before him is read.
The family
The Smith–Tolliver generations
The archive centres on Hilliard Taliaferro / Tolliver and Bettie Alexander Tolliver, their daughter Laura Tolliver Smith, her husband John Smith, and the household the two of them built across Mississippi and, in time, Illinois. From that household the archive follows two documented descendant branches — one leading to Emmett Till, one to the archive's founder.
The research
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, always captioned with the original source, and always alongside the original record.
The technology
Built so the evidence stays attached
BEFORE TILL is built on a research data model rather than a tree: people, claims, sources, evidence observations, conclusions, revisions, and citations are separate records, linked to one another and each carrying a persistent identifier. That is why a page can show you the reasoning behind a statement, why a relationship can be computed rather than asserted, and why a revision can be published without erasing what it replaced.
Ask the Archive answers only from published records in that model, and declines rather than infers. Interpretive imagery is labelled wherever it appears. Living people are withheld unless consent is recorded.
The founder
Amberly R. Carter-Mills
Founder, Creator & Descendant Archivist
Amberly R. Carter-Mills is a cultural technologist, descendant researcher, and the founder, creator, and archivist of BEFORE TILL: The Living Evidence Archive. Working from her own family line, she reconstructs the Smith–Tolliver generations across slavery, emancipation, and migration, building an archive in which every published conclusion carries its evidence, its status, and its revision history. Her work distinguishes what can be documented from what the family remembers and what remains unknown.
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. Attribution for this work is permanent and non-transferable.
More about AmberlyWhat comes next
The work ahead
- More Smith family branches
- Enslaved-community research beyond the named household
- Land and homestead reconstruction
- Expanded mapping of movement and place