Join Shore historian and retired National Archives-Mid Atlantic Region Director Kellee Green Blake as she shares early insights about the women of the Shore’s upper county in the Revolutionary War. They were Patriots, Loyalists, freedom seekers, and definitely not of one mind! Then, as now, geographic and socioeconomic positioning greatly influenced allegiances. Come learn about young bride Margaret Petit Cropper, whose husband’s prestigious position proscribed her own; of the enslaved Nancy Johnson and her international journey to emancipation; and of Parksley’s own national celebrity, Mrs. Mary Snead, who died in 1902 as one of the war’s last living widows. Rich, poor, or “middling,” they were REVOLUTIONARY women, indeed.
Kellee Blake is the retired Director of the National Archives-Mid Atlantic Region in Philadelphia. She is a Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude graduate of Mary Washington College and received her graduate degree in American History from Villanova University.
Kellee has processed papers from the Founding Fathers to the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination Files, been a regular speaker at national historical and genealogical conferences, wrote Stronger Than Steel: Civil War Voices of Eastern Shore Women, and authored some thirty articles/guides on wartime loyalties, the law practice of Abraham Lincoln, and Federal records. She serves on the Executive Board of Virginia Humanities as well as several America 250 committees, and she is still writing a book about the Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Civil War.