Slavery is where the record begins. Everything after is the point.
TABBY: FOR LIFE® traces six generations of four interconnected African American families — the Burtons, the Braswells, the Williams', and the Rogers' — in Manatee County, Florida, from 1822 to the present. It begins with Nelson Burton, an enslaved craftsman recorded as Property #36 in an 1822 plantation ledger at Gamble Plantation in Ellenton, Florida — one of the only standing antebellum homes in Florida, now a designated State Park. Nelson built the tabby-stone walls that still stand there today. His wife, Mariah Burton Washington, began building a family on land she claimed in her heart before she had the documents to prove it. This is not a documentary about slavery. It is a documentary about what rises from it. The series follows the unbroken matrilineal thread that carried these families forward — Mariah Burton Washington, Malissia Burton Adams, Bessie Adams Williams, Frances Williams Braswell, and Minnie Thompson Rogers — women who bore the children, taught them who they were, and passed a covenant forward through everything history placed in their way.
The living generation carries memories and family papers that will not survive without documentation. Archival records from this era of Florida history are fragile. Oral histories are irreplaceable. TABBY: FOR LIFE® creates a permanent record of this knowledge before it is lost — and places Manatee County on the national map of documented African American Southern history.
Creator, director, and producer Lynda F. Williams is a direct descendant of the families this series documents — great-granddaughter of Cleveland and Bessie Adams Williams and of G.D. Rogers Sr. and Minnie Thompson Rogers. Raised between Maryland and Washington, D.C., she spent childhood summers in this Florida county and returned permanently to Manatee County in 2021, bringing five years of archival research and access no outside storyteller could replicate.
Your contribution helps fund principal photography, archival licensing, and post-production for a seven-episode series that turns fragments of family history into something that lasts — the way tabby stone, made from oyster shells, ash, and lime, hardens under pressure into structures that endure for centuries.
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