Your Guide to Finding African American Ancestors

Societies you may want to join

• The Fred Hart Williams Genealogy Society is dedicated to researching African American families.  It meets at the Detroit Public Library. 
• If you join the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical  Society you will receive a journal.
   

Selected Online Sites for More Information.

• Family Search Research Wiki: African American Research Portal
• Print out the African American Quick Guide available from the Family History Library
• Print out Finding Records of Your Ancestors: African American Part A 1870+
  • There is an online video of a presentation given at the 2006 AAHGS Conference amd available with other videos from this conference on Roots TV. Scroll down to find the 3 part video given by Mary Hill.
• Hogan. African American Research. This three part article provides a good overview of the challenges and resources relevant to searching African American ancestors and ends with a case study. Links to parts 2 and 3 are at the beginning.
• A briefer guide is the Rootsweb lesson on African American Ancestry
• Take time to explore these two major sites
  • AfriGeneas.  
  • Christine's Genealogy
• Because many records on African Americans are kept at the National Archives, you will want to read the NARA Page on African American Research.
• See also these articles in Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Reccords Administration "Genealogy Note" articles on African American research using records in the National Archives.
• Cliff Murray has built a site called African American Lifelines to help the beginning researcher.
• If you create your own web page, you may want to add it to the African American Genealogy Web Ring; if not, you may just want to browse the pages.
  

Specific Topics of Interest

Cemeteries:

• African American Cemeteries Online -- links to online transriptions of African American cemeteries.
• An interesting article about slave cemeteries ; if you google the words SLAVE CEMETERIES you will find many such articles online, as well as some transcriptions and information about specific cemeteries. To see if there is something of interest in an area you research, add a place name. For example, try googling these three words: slave cemeteries mecklenburg
• "History of African American Cemeteries" -- a very interesting overview of practices, mostly relating to slave burials.

Census: Rembember: 1870 forward as with all other research.

• There are separate enumerations for slaves 1860 and 1850 giving age and gender of each slave owned by a specific person. 1850 also asks number of slaves manumitted and number who are fugitives from the state.
• 1820 , 1830 and 1840 provide age breakdowns for all other free persons, but the groupings differ than those for white families.
• 1790, 1800 and 1810 asks only for the total number of slaves and total number of "all other free persons" ; instructions specify this is to exclude Indians not taxed.
  
• African American Census Records Online (from Afrigeneas)
• Christine's Genealogy website also includes links to various census transcriptions online

Church: Directory of African American Religious Bodies (find in a library.)

Migration:

• Visit the website for "In Motion" a site designed to help African Americans understand and trace the migrations of their ancestors. It has a huge database... 17,000 pages of text, 8, 350 photographs and 65 maps. It will take you some time to explore the wealth of information there.
• The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages. Again you will have to take time to explore this extensive resource. A good first step would be to view the demo that gives an overview of the site. (You'll have to give the demo time to download). NOTE: this database includes data on all transatlantic trade, of which voyages to North America comprised only a small protion. It is a fabulous resource, but requires details beyond which you are likely to have, especially as you begin your research.

Military:

• For a brief summary of African American particpation in military conflicts, see African American Freedom Fighters: Soldiers for Liberty.
• FamilySearch Wiki African American: Military also gives a brief overview of black particpation in military conflicts
• African Americans in Early American Military History
• Black Loyalists
• African American Warriers

Names:

• Because of the heritage of slavery, surnames for African Americans may be connected to other families or simply adopted as a choice upon emancipation. "Large Slaveholders of 1860 and African American surname matches from 1870" :
• In 2001 Tom Black undertook a study to determine the correlation of surnames of slave owners with surnames of freed slaves. He estimates that in 1860, slaveholders of 200 or more slaves, while constituting less than 1 % of the total number of U.S. slaveholders held 20-30% of the total number of slaves in the U.S. His study of these large slaveholders spans 150 southern counties in 10 states and direct descendants of slaveholders can determine if their ancestor was in this category; African American descendants of persons who were enslaved in a particular County in 1860, if they have an idea of the surname of the slaveholder, can check this list for the surname. If the surname is found, they can then view the census image elsewhere for the details listed regarding the sex, age and color of the slaves.
• In his article "What's in a Name" (Family Chronicle Feb. 2007 p. 17) Rick Crume notes that since may African Americans have Welsh names, there is the argument that many slave holders were Welsh and mentions an interesting website that argues against this notion: Why do Welsh names seem to be so common within the African American community ? 
• To find others researching African-Americans, search the Afrigeneas Surname Database and Registry.

Newspapers

• See if your local public library has this book (if not, suggest they purchase it!) African American Newspapers and Periodicals: a National Bibliography and Union List. (find in a library)
• Index to Black Newspapers (find in a library)
• America's first African-American Newspaper, Freedom's Journal, is available online.
• Advertisements for runaway slaves were prevelant in early newspapers and can be a source of information.
  • The Geography of Slavery in Virginia provides both examples of such ads, as well as a very helpful contextual overview.
  • Here are some from Baltimore, Maryland
  • These didn't appear only in southern newspapers; here are some from a variety of colonial papers in the north.
  • If your ancestor was a runaway slave from the south you might want to read Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (find in a library)

Registrations

A 1780 law in Pennsylvania required the registration of all slaves in the state, as part of a movement to abolish slavery in the state. This registration, which must be researched county by county, gives us a 1780 census of slaves in Pennsylvania. Here is an example of information recorded.

Many states also passed laws requiring free blacks to register, or some may have registered as a safeguard against being taken into slavery. Here is an example of Albermarle County Virginia registrations.

The Freedman's Bureau

• Freedman's Bureau Family Search Wiki
• Freedman's Bureau online
• The Freedman's Bureau Project
• NARA. The Freedman's Bureau 1856-1872

Pre Civil War Research

Free Blacks in colonial and antebellum America:

• Free People of Color (Wikipedia)
• Free Negro/Free Black (Wikipedia)
• FrenchCreoles.com provides a rather cluttered, but intereting overview of the Free People of Color of New Orleans
• Free Negro in Virginia 1619-1895 -- a book published in 1913 by Johns Hopkins University, available from Google Books
• "black laws" sometimes required the registration of free black populations in a state; sometimes the laws were so suppressive they forced blacks to move to another area or set up obstacles to settlement. Examples:
  • Black Laws of Oregon
  • Black Laws of Ohio
  • Louisiana's Code Noir
  • An introduction to the Black Laws of Virginia
  • Free Blacks in Marylan

Finding Slave Ancestors: 

Wikipedia: Slavery in the United States of America

The importation of slaves into the U.S. was outlawed in 1807, although there may have been illegal transport after that.

Slave Narratives

• Slave Narratives from a WPA project. The American Memory Project also has narratives from this project
• Born in Slavery
• There were also many published slave narratives; some are available on North American Slave Narratives.

Slave States

• Slavery and the Making of America
  • Time Line of Slavery in the U.S.
• Map of 1820 showing free and slave states and territories.
• Chart showing number of slaves enumerated, by state, in 1860. Note: number of slaveholders is deceptive; that column is more accurately the number of slave holding households. More than one owner might reside in a household.
• Slave states at the start of the Civil War
• Slavery in the North

Record sources relevant to researching slave ancestors:

Records of slaves will be found in a variety of documents, but research is greatly hampered by the practice of using only given names for slaves.

General

• The International Society of Sons and Daughters of Slave Ancestry has a small web site with contact information.
• State Library of North Carolina: Finding Slave Ancestors (a short article outlining resources available)
• Genealogy Trails: Slave Related Data
• Kentucky African American Griots: slave database
• AfriGeneas has a database of slave data on the web that you can search. You can also contribute information
• Some records are online at AfriQuest
• There is an Ancestry.com board covering Slave Information
• This is a very interesting database: Large Slaveholders of 1860 and African American Surname Matches From 1870

Court Records: wills, property, manumission, registers etc. You will have to research the specifics of record keeping for the state in which you are searching.

• Digital Library on American Slavery "The Digital Library contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites. These data have been painstakingly extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, amended petitions, among others. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 individual slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slave owners and non-slave owners. "

Use the FHL Catalog to find what court records have been filmed. Check at all three: state, county and local level. Here are some subdivisions that might prove useful:

• Court Records
• Minorities
• Slavery and Bondage
  
• Probate
• Land and Property

David Paterson has written an excellent article on finding Georgia's Slave Population in Legal Records; even if you are researching another state, this should serve as a guide as to the types of records you might find and where you might look

Beth Wilson has a 3 part video available at Roots Video: Trails Back: Tracing Ancestors in Slavery that is well worth watching. Each part is about 20 minutes and it covers census, land, probate records, as well as mthodology. Give it a few minutes to start and I found the sound to be a little loud, so had to decrease the volume.

Plantation and other Private Records

• Bible records of the owners may name slaves; here is an example
  • Google slave bible records to find some online.
  • Check bible records in southern archives and libraries; here is an example of some held at the University of Virginia.
• Find plantation records in southern archives, libraries and historical societies.
  • Consult A Genealogical Index to the Guides of the Microfilm Edition of Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution Through the Civil War (2003). (find in a library) (Note: for those of us in Michigan, U Mich Library has this book AND the microform set)
    • Otherswise.-- A librarian can help you find which libraries own the microfilm set and once you find that, ask the librarian to try to order the reel you need on interlibrary loan.
• example of a plantation record held at University of NC-Chapel Hill
• Article: Learning from Southern Plantation Records

Slave Insurance Policies -- these are just starting to become available to researchers.

• Slave Insurance in America (Wikipedia)
• Slave Insurance Policies Uncovered
• Slavery Era Insurance Policy Registers gives a state by state listing of names already compiled.

More Links...

• Access Genealogy African American Genealogy
• Cyndi's List: African American Genealogy
• Genealinks: African American Genealogy