In 1746, Margaret Tilghman, aged four, inherited several enslaved people from an aunt. One of those people was a 17-year-old woman named Eve. She may have cared for Margaret and her younger siblings at their plantation in Talbot County and then moved to Mount Clare when Margaret married Charles Carroll in 1863.
Margaret gave birth to twin girls who died in infancy. Perhaps Eve cared for them, too.
When Margaret died in 1817, a “verry old” enslaved woman called Old Eve was listed on her estate inventory. If it were the same person, she would have been 87 at that time. Old Eve was not freed, but allowed to live with John and Henny Lynch, who, along with three of their eight children, were freed by Margaret’s executors. By the 1830 census, Old Eve had passed away.
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An elderly, formerly enslaved woman named Aunt Lucy, at nearly 100 years old in 1915. She was enslaved for fifty years (1815 – 1865) at the Hermitage Plantation in Alabama. Courtesy of the Public Domain.