GGGG Grandpa Gilmore and his slave Paul

So many people around us have died in the last weeks that I retreated to look at the long dead. In his 1818 will Charles Gilmore, my GGGG grandfather, left his wife his "negro boy Willson" and his "negro man Paul." After the widow died Willson was to go to Gilmore's daughter Sarah. What's interesting is what he did with Paul, who was to go "to the daughter he chooses" from among the 3 unmarried daughters. This seems not worded so as to include the possibility of Paul's choosing Gilmore's "daughter Margaret Tindal," to whom he left $10. Margaret's daughter Jane Tindall Costner became my GG Grandmother and Kevin Costner's GGG grandmother.

Charles arrived in Charleston among a shipment of Protestants in 1768 at 15 years old, just old enough to be granted land out in the interior of the colony, where they could withhold and hold the land from Indians. He's in the Roster of South Carolina Patriots in the American Revolution as a horseman and as a footman (meaning infantryman) and lived out a life thickly connected with people around Thicketty Creek and Gilkies Creek and Broad River.  So far I have not found any mark of his character other than giving Paul a choice. That may have to be the nearest I get to a defining glimpse.

I am reminded again that not a single one of my white ancestors immigrated to the United States and neither of my parents was born in a state in the United States. How long before no one will be able to say that?