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. […]
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Category: Slave Research
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 […]
Finding State Laws About Slaves and Free...
Finding state laws about slaves and free blacks has always been a complicated process. If you’re the typical genealogist like me, you didn’t have easy access to expensive databases. You had to visit a law library and search each year’s laws. You could also try to do that online. I promise you it was no fun. […]
The Complexity of Slave Surnames
Numerous historical sources confirm that enslaved people had surnames that they used among themselves and in many cases were known by their slaveholder. However, the common practice by slaveholders was to only use the given names of enslaved people in documents such as estate papers, court and deed records. This causes many researchers to […]
More Suggestions for White Slaveholder D...
I was encouraged that many of you read my last blog post, and shared your feelings about being the descendants of slaveholders. That post had over 7,000 views! (Update, 12/2108: Over 25,000 views of that post). At a time when so much ugliness is on display daily in our country, it heartens me that there […]
Suggestions For the White Descendants of...
I have been pondering this topic for awhile and received a recommendation to discuss it on my blog. It’s an important one I think, but one fraught with all the ugliness that discussions of slavery and race entail. What follows are informed thoughts I’d like to offer garnered from the almost 20 years that I have been researching […]
Freedmen’s Bureau Record Uncovers Likely
I made a big discovery recently courtesy of Familysearch’s newly indexed Freedmen’s Bureau Labor Contracts. A Little Background Several years ago, I used cluster research to trace my Tennessee ancestor Mike Fendricks back to his Alabama roots. At a standstill with Mike, I traced the roots of Dee Suggs, a man Mike lived with in […]
A Slave’s Letter to His Former Master
UPDATE: After I posted this, I discovered more articles about the history of Jordan Anderson, the author of this amazing letter. The Smithsonian wrote an article and I enjoyed this article in the UK’s Daily Mail, which provides extensive background research on Jordan. In terms of genealogy, this author satisfies family historians. Historical Background Jordan Anderson was indeed a real person […]
Thomas S. Sudler Account Book
I’ve written before about the information that can be found in what I call Community Papers. These Papers include account books, diaries, ledgers, loose papers, family records, etc. These are the papers of (usually) prominent men and families. They might be large slaveholders, doctors, merchants or lawyers. Almost every library and archives has these kinds of […]