Having an excellent reputation in the community, they easily secured the cooperation of the influential white people in the city.

Out of this family came Robert A.Pelham, for years editor of a weekly in Detroit, and from 1901 to the present time an employee of the Federal Government in Washington.
The children of the Richards, another old family, were in no sense inferior to the descendants of the others.

The most prominent and the most useful to emerge from this group was the daughter, Fannie M.Richards.

She was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, October 1, 1841.

Having left that State with her parents when she was quite young, she did not see so much of the antebellum conditions obtaining there.