In 2011, after a 26-year career in the U.S. Army, Lloyd Byrd heard his ancestors calling.
He bought some goats and chickens and planted a vegetable garden. Amid pines where cicadas chirp and red-tailed hawks hunt, Byrd took up a life that would have been familiar to his great-grandfather, one of the first Black farmers to inherit land in Liberty County over a century ago.
Yet his dream of restoring his family farm quickly turned into an administrative and legal quagmire far too common for Georgia’s Black families. While his family held long memories of work and life at the Riceboro homestead, neither the county nor state government had a recorded title to those lands.
Byrd’s great-grandfather, Cane Stevens, buried less than a mile from the farm, never filed a will at the courthouse. For three generations, Byrd’s family paid property taxes, but couldn’t benefit from the land as legal owners. Byrd couldn’t apply for federal disaster aid, or farm subsidies or use the family land as collateral for loans.
Byrd spent 14 years restoring the title and legal status of the family property, a journey that took him from the concrete steps of his great-grandfather’s house to heavy, dusty deed books in the Liberty County courthouse. The hunt for old survey markers in Weyerhaeuser timberland behind his family farm, plus three lawyers to check and file paperwork, cost thousands of dollars.
Along the way, Byrd would discover the property was eight acres larger than the family had known. He became so fluent in the intricacies of heirs’ property — real estate inherited without filed legal paperwork — that he was appointed to the county tax assessor’s board and has led heirs’ property workshops for the community.
Was the hassle worth it? “Definitely,” Byrd said. “Our ancestors went through so much to get that, and to let it fall by the wayside would just be heartbreaking. You know, what they did and went through, not necessarily for themselves, but intended for their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to have something and not go through as much as they did.”
How big is the problem?
Byrd’s story exemplifies the struggle of hundreds of Black families in Liberty County and Coastal Georgia to claim the generational wealth their ancestors built amid Jim Crow violence and administrative barriers to full citizenship in the American South.
Yet if the struggle to document the land owned by Black families is hard, so too is the task of placing a value on that property.
County tax officials say they’ve never tried to count the number of heirs’ properties on the tax rolls. What’s more, they say they wouldn’t know how to start such a count. Instead, officials rely on estate designations on titles and driving past overgrown parcels to deduce whether a property might be heirs’ property.
The issue gained importance in 2017 after significant numbers of Coastal Georgia Black families were rejected for federal emergency assistance due to Hurricane Irma because they lacked titles to their land.
That sparked a partnership whereby federal researchers used satellite imagery, tax data and failed applications to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to try to measure the scale of the issue. Their work surfaced approximately 30,687 likely heirs’ properties in 15 Georgia counties.
These included Chatham (15,102), Liberty (1,645), McIntosh (370), Glynn (1,935), and Camden (1,338). Bryan County was not included in the study because satellite imagery showed no flooding from Hurricane Irma.
Valuing that property also proved tricky. Likely heirs’ property values for Chatham ($1.73 billion), McIntosh ($35 million), and Glynn (over $1 billion) were based on county tax records. Because Liberty and Camden had significant gaps in appraisal data, the study’s authors said, those values could not be estimated.
Black land ownership in Liberty, one of Georgia’s first counties, predates the Civil War, but exploded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when a generation of freed Black people settled on farms and raised their families.
Byrd’s family oral history says Cane Stevens inherited land in 1902 previously owned by his father, an emancipated man named Joseph Stevens. It’s not clear how Joseph came to own the land, Byrd said, but it could have been given to Joseph by his former enslaver or bought with money from sharecropping or “task system” side jobs in his free time.
For decades, Byrd said, Black families didn’t interact with white judges, clerks and elected officials in Liberty County, a place like so many in Georgia where Black people were lynched, threatened, swindled and disenfranchised.
Instead, families relied on informal inheritance. Although relatives might know physical demarcations of their family’s land, whether a tree stump or a creek, those original boundaries were rarely mapped out.
Meanwhile, few civil servants were inclined to help unsnarl property titles that grew ever more tangled after first- and second-generation Black property owners died off without recorded ownership documents or wills.
“We’ve got hundreds of heirs’ properties that have more than, you know, a couple of heirs to the property.” said Scott Wall, mapping supervisor for the Liberty County Tax Assessor’s Office. “You need some bounds and descriptions, OK, going back to the original when, you know, wherever they got the property from — bounded by this person, bounded by a trail.”
That lack of formal estate planning complicated property inheritance for generations, as family numbers — and sometimes family feuds — grew.
Liberty County Probate Judge Nancy K. Aspinwall, who has served since 1976, has watched the problem of heirs’ properties multiply in that time due to probate fights and challenges.
“It’s not as simple as people think,” Aspinwall said. Every heir has to be found and given proper notice that they are heirs to an estate. Then the heirs have to agree on an administrator. Then the judge appoints an administrator. Only then can heirs’ decisions about what to do with the land begin.
While the court can give people forms to fill out, it cannot give people legal advice.
“It’s very difficult to have people understand,” Aspinwall said. “And it’s too bad we don’t have more helpful tools.”
One tool that offers some help is the Uniform Partition of Heirs’ Property Act, which is law in 27 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The act, which Georgia passed in 2012 just as Byrd was starting to explore his own title issues, standardizes how heirs’ property estates can be settled. It also allows other heirs to buy the share of a single heir who does not want to keep the property.
A place to call home
In Byrd’s case, he had to grapple with both a mapping nightmare and changes to his extended family tree on his quest to formalize ownership of his great-grandfather’s farm.
Liberty County marriage records show Cane married Florence Carter on May 29, 1904. They farmed their land, raised a family, made sure the kids could read and write, and grew old there. Cane died in 1966 when Byrd was a baby.
Byrd’s grandmother, Lottie, who moved to Florida when she got married, held the land for a time. When she died, her daughter, Christine — Byrd’s mother, born in Liberty County in 1943 — became the heir.
Byrd himself was born far from the farm — in New York — but vacationed in Liberty as a child. When he was about 8, his mother moved him and his sister to Miami, where his grandfather, Lloyd West, grew mangoes, pineapples, coconuts, and sweet grapefruit in the backyard.
There, Byrd discovered the magic of cultivating food and how tasty fruit could be in a house where no one kept cake or candy due to the prevalence of diabetes.
“My candy was in the backyard,” Byrd said, “and everything back there was sweet, including the grapefruit.” It dawned on him that raising his own food was a key to independence.
Byrd’s mother moved him and his sister back to Riceboro. He graduated from Bradwell Institute in 1983, then joined the Army as a way to financially support his first child.
Although Byrd’s military career took him far from Liberty County, he helped his mother pay property taxes on her share of Cane’s homestead.
When Byrd retired in 2011, the man who had always cared more about the absolutes of math than the subjectivity of history felt drawn to his ancestral sandy soil in Riceboro. He quickly discovered he would have to spend as much time learning administrative and property regulations as he did clearing brush on the neglected property.
‘What you’ve got is a piece of paper’
Instead of the tidy farmstead Byrd had remembered as a boy, the property had been overrun with scrub pines and dense brush. Cane’s original house had long ago burned to the ground, but the newer home itself had collapsed from neglect.
By 2014, Byrd had successfully cleared enough space to tear down the old house. He drilled a new well after the pipe broke off the original one and moved a mobile home to the property.
The Army veteran was expecting a new baby, and his uncle tried to help formalize Byrd’s right to live on the property by signing a quitclaim deed.
Byrd lived on the land for two years before he realized that his property claim was not formalized.
He went to the bank for a loan and was told that the quitclaim deed was merely “a piece of paper.”
Byrd decided to get his family’s affairs in order: “I started figuring out that the longer you wait, the worse it gets,” he said.
Correcting the record
Byrd had learned in the Army to take a methodical path to problem-solving. He considered himself rather adept with paperwork. But he hadn’t yet encountered Liberty County’s administrative archives.
Byrd’s great-grandfather is memorialized with a modest white gravestone that reads CANE STEVENS, located about a mile from the farm and across from First African Baptist Church, where he had been an elder. Yet most county records spelled his first name “Cain” and, in at least one instance, “Caine.” Those variations on how strangers recorded a name could prevent heirs from finding important documents or evidence of property ownership.
Byrd’s family, however, had a strong oral history of ownership. Relatives knew that Joe had given the land to Cane around 1900, along with a written deed. But neither man had it recorded at the courthouse. Sometime around 1920, Cane’s house burned to the ground, along with everything in it, including the deed.
U.S. Census records show Cane and his family living close to, but not on, their land in 1920, returning to the property by the 1930 Census.
But Byrd’s great-aunt, Flossie Stevens DeShazior, filed an affidavit in 1995 as Cane Stevens’ last surviving child. Her testimony, recorded in Liberty County, created a legal document that essentially replaced the missing deed and linked the 27 acres of land to Cane’s descendants. Aunt Flossie died in 1999, and Byrd’s mother died a few years later, leaving the land to him and his sister.
The foresight of his great-aunt made Byrd’s job of formalizing his claim less complicated.
In 2018, Byrd contacted all the descendants to ask them if they wanted to claim their shares of the land. He paid an attorney only to check and file the required paperwork to announce his intentions to take over the property. This included updating the 1995 affidavit to reflect deceased and current heirs.
In 2021, Byrd petitioned the court to appoint him as administrator of Cane’s estate. This required each of the other 20 living heirs to file a piece of paper with the court, saying they agreed. This process alone took nearly two years.
He then had to pay for multiple property surveys, one to research and redraw Cane’s property lines, then nine more to subdivide the land so that all heirs could claim an equal slice, if they wanted it.
The tracts were not adjacent, and ultimately were divided between five branches of the family.
Byrd estimates that he spent hundreds of hours in the clerk of court’s real estate room and the tax assessor’s office during the process. The county officials got to trust his expertise to the point that the county’s then-chief appraiser suggested Byrd take some Georgia Department of Revenue classes and apply for a seat on the county tax assessor’s board.
How to keep it in the family
Byrd did have some help along the way from McIntosh S.E.E.D. a Darien nonprofit that helps heirs reclaim their properties and maximize their value. Byrd learned about U.S Department of Agriculture programs for small farmers, soil conservation, and legal trusts to protect family land.
Byrd reached the end of his journey on March 14, 2024, when he received full title to two tracts plus one acre, his share of Cane’s L-shaped property on Shell Road.
Now Byrd is really and truly home.
Fourteen years after he pulled his camper up to Cane’s land and dismantled the old house, a jumble of heavy farm equipment surrounds the two concrete steps that serve as silent monument to Cane’s time here. A few cows and goats flick their tails in a pen to the right of the driveway leading up to Byrd’s mobile home surrounded by fruit trees.
Byrd gets up a couple of hours before dawn to feed the animals and tend to his okra and squash. Some days, his life is devoted to farm chores. Other days, he drives his white pickup truck to physical therapy or to pick up his young son. His phone rings periodically with calls from relatives or friends seeking advice. And he serves on the Liberty County Board of Assessors.
Byrd has some advice for other Black families with heirs’ property: “Research research, research. Every situation is different, but to put the majority of time and effort into researching what’s available, where you can get help, attorneys. Get with your family and find out their desires, what they want to do, and start considering passing on generational wealth to the rest of your family. You’re not going to get rich, but at least you can have some kind of input as to what you leave behind.”
That includes making a succession plan and recording a notarized will at the courthouse.
“Wills help a lot,” he said. “Our issue is the trust level.” For a Black land owner in the 1920s and 1930s, he pointed out, “Where would you put it at where it wouldn’t be rewritten? Now all the online access, different capabilities to put things in place, trusts, holding companies, stuff like that, are invaluable parts of what’s available to you out there. Put forth the effort. It’ll be tedious for a little while, but it will benefit your family for generations to come.”
Heirs’ Property Resources
Historic Black Resources: A Handbook for the Identification, Documentation, and Evaluation of Historic African-American Properties in Georgia, Carol Merritt, Historic Preservation Services, Georgia Department of Natural Resources.
theyhadnames.org: Stacy Ashmore Cole’s invaluable site, where she has transcribed thousands of names of enslaved Blacks and free people of color in Liberty County, painstakingly combing through deeds, wills, and bills of sale.
FamilySearch.org: A free online genealogy site for building your family tree and finding records to document your ancestors.
Ancestry.com: A paid online genealogy site that also provides access to records. You can access it for free inside your local public library (but not online).
findagrave.com: A free online site that documents gravesites. Not all graves or cemeteries are documented but many are. You can request a photo of a loved one’s gravestone; volunteers take the photos, so a response may take months or years.
libertyhistory.net: The Liberty County Historical Society offers a starting point for learning about important figures who settled the county, as well as a shortcut to finding Liberty County graves, The organization is growing and plans to open a walk-in location on S. Main Street in Hinesville soon.
Georgia Heirs Property Law Center: Services are free, but limited by available funding. See their application at https://www.gaheirsproperty.org/apply-for-assistance for details.
Heirs Determination Worksheet (Georgia)
Afrigeanas.org (African American genealogy group; start here)
Community Housing Services Agency (Savannah and Chatham County)
Chatham Savannah Land Bank Authority
Nolo.com on Georgia intestate succession
Pan-African Family Empowerment & Land Preservation Network, Inc.
Liberty County Historical Society
Center for Agriculture and Food Systems, which offers an Heirs’ Property Legal Toolkit
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