Doing research on my family tree, I found out the 5th great grandfather of my son in law was the last white man executed by hanging in Johnston county NC in 1879....
When I first saw that news item from 1899, i was reading the rather garbled OCR text and it looked like some bad guy in the family had been hanged. Then I found the image of the paper and saw it was the little 3 year old boy.
Any idea why your SIL’s ancestor was hanged?