Bethany Veney

Bethany Veney (March 19, 1812 – November 16, 1915), was an American writer whose autobiography and slave narrative, Aunt Betty's Story: The Narrative of Bethany Veney, A Slave Woman, was published in 1889. Born into slavery on a farm near Luray, Virginia, as Bethany Johnson, she married twice. Her first husband was an enslaved man, Jerry Fickland, with whom she had a daughter, Charlotte. He was sold away from her and she later married Frank Veney, a free black man. She was sold on an auction block to her final enslaver, George J. Adams, who brought her to Providence, Rhode Island and freed her. After the American Civil War, Veney made four trips to Virginia to move her daughter and her family and 16 additional family members north to New England.