Nancybelle's maternal grandfather, Henry Scott Wilson, moved his family from Farmville, Virginia to Little Silver, New Jersey in the early 1920s.Nancybelle thinks the family earned the money to move north and buy the home by farming.

Farmville occupies a unique place among scholars in African American studies. It was the subject of a landmark 1897 sociological study, The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia, by W.E.B. Du Bois, the pioneering scholar and activist. At the turn of the century, Du Bois noted, the town was a trading center for the tobacco industry. Interesting, African Americans owned stock in some of the companies that warehoused tobacco. In many families, young men migrated to Richmond or to cities in the North in search of opportunities, then sent money home. Du Bois noted that most men worked in manufacturing, although a small but growing entrepreneurial class was emerging.

Young men and women also left town in search of an education -- many of them ending up at Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, now known as Virginia State University. Just past 20 years into the new century, Henry Wilson's daughter, Rovutter, would be one of those women. Rovutter is Nancybelle's mother.

Henry Wilson is pictured here in the backyard of his New Jersey home. Nancybelle's mother estimates that he was probably 60 years old when this picture was taken. The Wilsons may have been the first black homeowners in Little Silver. Although he died when Nancybelle was young, she remembers him a proud man.