Rachel Pettiford was a free woman of color born in Granville County, North Carolina in about 1752. She married Valentine Locus, a free man of color, in either 1770, 1774, or 1780, and the couple would go on to have at least eight children together. By 1790 the Locus family moved to Wake County, North Carolina. On September 29, 1801 a group of four men came into the Locus home in the middle of the night and severely beat Valentine and Rachel before abducting two of their children, Absalom and Polly. The criminals likely intended to sell the two children into slavery, but the children escaped their captors and returned to their parents. After Valentine Locus died in 1811, Rachel never remarried. In 1838 Rachel Locus made a successful application for a widow's pension based on her husband's military service. In respect of her husband's two years of service during the Revolutionary War, Rachel was entitled to $80 a year from 1831 until the time of her death. Rachel did not immediately see this money however, and in 1839 she filed an appeal to the U.S. Pension Office stating that her pension agent, Thomas Edwards, was taking the pension money for himself fraudulently. She died in Wake County in about August 1852.