A twelve-year-old girl, sold for five hundred piastres in 1833. An eleven-year courtroom battle that followed. A freedom judgment that produced seven documented generations. A true story, told from the primary source record — by her third great-grandson.
Her name appears once on the page. Louise. No surname. None was given to her.
She is twelve years old. Possibly thirteen. The record will not commit to a number.
The Record
In 1833, a girl named Louise was sold in St. James Parish, Louisiana, for five hundred piastres — the Spanish silver dollars that circulated at par with U.S. currency at the time. What followed was not a single act of cruelty but a documented chain of events: three notarial wills written by the man who purchased her, an eleven-year legal fight in Assumption Parish, and a freedom judgment that named her and her children statue liberi in 1853.
Every claim in this book is sourced to a primary document — court records, wills, baptismal certificates, and census entries — and every gap in the record is named as a gap, not filled with invention.
— from the Author's Note, "The Truth Protocol"The Docket
Annual Membership
Taught by Leonard Smith III from his own forty-eight-year search — from a single word, "Portugal," found in a census record in 1978, through the loss of his research archive in Hurricane Katrina, to the courthouse volume in Napoleonville that finally closed the case. This course is the method behind the book, made usable for your own family tree.
The research path in order — how a single word in an 1880 census entry became a forty-eight-year investigation, and what it actually took to rebuild an archive after losing it.
A practical guide to locating the documents that turn names and dates into a real story — and reading what they actually say.
Where AI tools genuinely speed up genealogical research — and where they don't. Practical use, not shortcuts around the archive.
The Companion Film
A companion documentary is in production, written and directed by Leonard Smith III, built to run alongside the book — the book carries the primary-source documentation, the film carries the visual language of the record: the handwriting, the seals, the courthouse where the case was heard.