(a posting by Mark Todd)
This post is the second in a two-part series describing my slaveholding ancestors and their slaves. Click here for Part One, which highlights selective slave-owner ancestors, their lives, and an overview of their slave holdings.
In this post, I enumerate below all the names, dates, and locations of the owners and their known slaves.
So far, I've identified thirty-three slave-owning great-great grandparents who, in the aggregate, owned about 200 human beings (actually, 190 enumerated individuals listed below besides verbiage that implies additional slaves).
The records below generally reference the male head of household only, except where a wife became a widow and I found specific records for slaves with her as subsequent head of household and owning slaves. These records include biographical data for the enslaved people when recorded but in only 28 cases the actual given names. As was typical of the times, after emancipation these individuals usually took the surname of the head-of-household of a given plantation.
Also note records report "Race" as either Black or Mulatto, the latter referring to a slave who is half Black and half White (see my previous post in this two-part series).
As staggering as this list is, I found a number of statements in wills and probate that sometimes suggested intentions that slaves be well treated after probate. For example, Thomas Lewis expressed concern about his "old" slave Rebecca who, after his wife Judith's death, was to be allowed to choose which among Lewis and Judith's children she wished to live with. One practice of the times for which I found no evidence among my ancestors was that slaves were to be freed at owner deaths.
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Below are resources and Websites where any readers who also have slave-owning ancestors can share their information to help African-American family genealogists find their roots.
First, watch this great video by Family Fanatics:
“What to Do When You Discover You Have Slave-Owning Ancestors”
And then these two articles for further guidance:
America Magazine
“My ancestor owned 41 slaves. What do I owe their descendants?”
Family Tree Magazine
"How to Find Slave Schedules and Share the Information in Them"
Mark and Kym Todd are volunteers on WikiTree, a project to create the entire human tree. Profiles, sources, and documents for key individuals described above are on WikiTree:
