Start here
Where would you like to begin?
BEFORE TILL is an evidence archive, not a family-tree site. Nothing here is asserted without a source, and nothing is smoothed over where the record is silent. Choose the way in that fits what you came for.
Choose a path
Four ways in
Path one
I want to meet the family
Begin with the family as people: a household in Mississippi, its labor, its movement, its losses. The narrative is written from records, and every scene says what it rests on.
Path two
I want to see the documents
Go straight to the record layer: individual claims, the documents behind them, the conflicts between them, and the questions still open.
Path three
I want to understand the Emmett connection
See how two descendants — Emmett Till and archive founder Amberly R. Carter-Mills — trace back to one ancestral household, with every link in the chain shown and rated.
Path four
I want to follow the research
See how the archive decides what it knows: the method, the notebook, the open questions, and every revision it has published.
The visual language
How to read every page
Direct documentary evidence supports the claim.
Multiple independent pieces of evidence support the conclusion.
The story has been preserved through family memory, oral history, or later family accounts but has not yet been independently established.
Evidence is incomplete, conflicting, or actively being researched.
Earlier family or public accounts conflict with stronger evidence and have been revised.
Before you cite
Four things worth knowing
- What does a status label mean?
- Every statement carries one. It tells you how much weight the archive puts behind it — and where a statement is only tradition, or still contested, the label says so plainly.
- Why are some names blank?
- Because the record left them blank. Enslavement, courthouse fires, and clerks who did not consider a family worth naming all produced silences. The archive shows the silence instead of filling it.
- Why is a person shown as private?
- Living people appear only with their consent. Without it, the archive shows the relationship but withholds the name.
- Can conclusions change?
- Yes. New records revise published findings, and each revision is logged with a date and a reason in the Research Ledger.