Founder
Amberly R. Carter-Mills
Amberly R. Carter-Mills is a cultural technologist and descendant researcher, and the founder of BEFORE TILL: The Living Evidence Archive, an evidence-linked public-history reconstruction of the Smith–Tolliver family.
- Founder, Creator & Descendant Archivist
- Cultural Technologist
- Researcher & Interpreter
About Amberly
Who is doing this work
Amberly R. Carter-Mills is a cultural technologist, descendant researcher, and public-history interpreter. She is the founder, creator, and descendant archivist of BEFORE TILL: The Living Evidence Archive, a genealogy and public-history project reconstructing the Smith–Tolliver family across slavery, emancipation, migration, and the generations that followed.
Carter-Mills built BEFORE TILL around a research standard rather than a narrative. Every person, claim, and relationship in the archive is tied to a cited source and carries a published evidence status: documented, corroborated, family tradition, under investigation, or corrected. Where the record was destroyed, withheld, or never kept — as it so often was for enslaved families — the archive names the silence instead of filling it.
She descends from the same ancestral household that produced Emmett Till, and designed the archive to hold that connection the way it holds every other: as a chain of documented links, each one visible and independently checkable. She writes the archive's research briefs, sets its methodology, and signs its corrections.
A note from the descendant
A note from the descendant
I grew up knowing that Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley were part of my family story. But the deeper I researched our genealogy, the more I realized that the public story often begins in 1955.
Our family did not.
BEFORE TILL is my effort to recover the generations who came before — to document their names, relationships, lives, struggles, migrations, faith, land, and the evidence they left behind.
This archive distinguishes what we can prove, what our family remembers, and what we are still trying to discover.
— Amberly R. Carter-Mills
My connection to the family
Descent, computed not asserted
Amberly descends from the same ancestral household that produced Emmett Till. That relationship is not stated here as a fact of biography — it is computed from the published parent–child links in the archive, shown with the evidence status of every link in the chain, and reported as provisional wherever a link is still under investigation.
Research approach
The standard she holds the archive to
Evidence before narrative
No claim is published without a cited source and a stated evidence status. A compelling story is not a reason to promote a tradition to a fact.
Name the silence
Where the record was destroyed, withheld, or never kept, the archive says so rather than estimating around it.
Family memory is its own category
Oral history is recorded faithfully, cited as testimony, and kept as Family Tradition until an independent record confirms it.
Publish the revisions
When new evidence overturns a conclusion, the change, its date, and its reason are published alongside the old conclusion.
Selected research
Published work in the archive
Media and speaking
For journalists, scholars, and educators
BEFORE TILL: The Living Evidence Archive is a digital public-history and genealogy project created by cultural technologist and descendant researcher Amberly R. Carter-Mills. The project reconstructs the Smith–Tolliver family across slavery, emancipation, migration, family memory, and later generations using evidence-linked genealogy, historical records, and interactive technology.
Bios at three lengths, key findings by evidence status, approved images, and citation guidance are collected in the press centre. Inquiries reach the archive through the same reviewed channel as every other message.
Cite my work
Attribution
The research, analysis, and interpretation in BEFORE TILL are the original work of Amberly R. Carter-Mills, Hello Ambi, LLC. The historical records cited belong to their repositories.
Carter-Mills, Amberly R. BEFORE TILL: The Living Evidence Archive. Public Beta · Version 0.1. https://beforetill.com (accessed [date]).
Full citation guidance