Genealogists and historians Noreen J. Goodson and Donna Tyler Hollie have recently published “Through the Tax Assessor’s Eyes: Enslaved People, Free Blacks and Slaveholders in Early Nineteenth Century Baltimore.” This book is a welcome addition to the historiography of early Baltimore history and takes its rightful place aside works by Ralph Clayton, Barbara Jeanne Fields […]
You are browsing archives for
Category: Posts 2014-2019
When Original Sources Are Wrong
Frank Gowen married Matilda Davis on 17 August 1916 in Duval County, Florida. Seems pretty straightforward, right? This is an original source, after all. Except it isn’t accurate. Matilda married Frank GARVIN. And a seemingly small detail like that can throw your research off into all kinds of wrong directions. The Beginning of Trouble When […]
Teaching the Hard History of Slavery
This will be another long post. Sigh. The Southern Poverty Law Center released a report last week called “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.” The Atlantic ran an article about the report. It’s a sobering read. For me, it was deeply disturbing, though not surprising. So much of what we suffer in this country is *directly* […]
The Long, Long Hold of Slavery
After emancipation, the vast majority of the 4 million newly freed slaves remained living near their former owners, if not working directly for them. Some did leave the area of their enslavement. They left with the Union Army, migrated to nearby cities for work or left in search of loved ones who had been sold. […]
Slaves are in the FAN Club, Too
Genealogists often use cluster research as a research strategy. As a shorthand, you will often hear people call this idea finding your ancestor’s “FAN” club: their friends, associates and neighbors. Expanding your focus to a group of people as opposed to one couple or one nuclear family dramatically increases your chances of solving tough research problems. […]
What Did Slavery Look Like?
President Lincoln spent a lot of time studying the map above, created by the United States Coast Survey. The darker the shading, the higher the percentage of enslaved laborers. Slavery maps such as this and several new databases help us understand the experiences of enslaved ancestors. At a glance we can see the density in […]
Beware the Death Certificate
The information on a death certificate is a rich terrain for genealogists, but a tricky one. We cannot take all of its information as accurate without examining more information from other sources. Only the date and cause of death on a death certificate, usually verified by the attending medical professional, has a high probability of […]
Dating Family Photographs
I have been interested for a long time in vintage pictures of African-American families, whether they are related to me or not. There’s just something about seeing a picture of someone who we know mostly through the census and vital and the other sources in genealogy. DuBois understood the power of images when he assembled a […]
Prove Identity: Don’t Just Match Names
Identity is a critical concept to understand in genealogy. Too often we assume that a person with the same name living in the same place must be our ancestor. That is a mistake. You’ll hear the phrase “The Names the Same” for this concept. I addressed this topic in 2009 but thought it worthy of repeating. The […]
Fall In Love With Libraries Again
Oh, my fellow genealogists. We have become blinded by the light, we have taken the wooden nickel. Ancestry. Familysearch. Fold3. Any digital archives. We have left our strong and steady marriage for a fling on the wild side. I’m talking about libraries. Good old faithful brick and mortar libraries. Now, I will be the first […]