“Official” records tell us nearly nothing of Willie McDaniel or his family, and nothing from his or his family’s perspective: No photos, no surviving police or medical records, no court transcripts. What do exist are about 50 stories from the Charlotte Observer and Charlotte News, the two daily newspapers of the time, owned and run by white people. (The Observer published in the morning and the News in the afternoon; they were separately owned and run.)

Available archives of the weekly Black-owned Star of Zion show one story, an editorial, about Willie McDaniel (described in the July 11 section of the main story), and no archives are available of this time for the Black-owned Charlotte Post, also a weekly. 

So this detailed story about Willie McDaniel, and the links to additional context throughout it, draw from the daily newspaper stories (comparing them to each other for inconsistencies), along with other newspaper coverage of policing and court cases, genealogical records, wills, deeds, maps and more. 

In tracing their family histories through census data and marriage/birth/death records, Black people have much more limited opportunities than white people do in the United States: In federal censuses, enslaved people weren’t even identified individually until 1850 and then (and in 1860) only by gender, age and “colour.” Spellings and dates were often erratic in censuses, as were ages and relationships to heads of households. (The Remembrance Project uses 22 as Willie McDaniel’s age because his wife was the informant for his death certificate and that is the age listed there.) People sometimes changed their surnames between censuses. And nearly the whole country’s 1890 census information was lost in a fire, creating a 20-year information gap that cripples many people’s searches for their ancestors.

Documenting other McDaniel generations is ongoing work.