Documenting enslaved ancestors
If you enjoy solving puzzles, this is a very meaningful way to do it
Tracing the history of enslaved ancestors is really hard. If you’re lucky, you can find them on the 1870 census, not long after emancipation, perhaps in the same area where they were enslaved. Often, even that is very difficult to do, because many formerly enslaved people moved all over the country after emancipation and in the ensuing decades. If you don’t have some idea of where your ancestors may have lived before you, you have a very broad search ahead, as you might find them just about anywhere in the continental United States.
Prior to 1870, it only gets harder. Often the only documentation of enslaved people is found in records of their sale, probate files (where the enslaved people owned by a person who died are included as part of their estate appraisal), mortgage documents, runaway advertisements in the newspaper, and even more esoteric sources.
I personally do not have any lines that I can trace back to an enslaved person. (This isn’t to say I don’t have any ancestors who were enslaved… just that I don’t know who they were.) I also don’t have any lines that go back to any large slaveholders. I’ve found a few first cousins many times removed who either were large slaveholders or married large slaveholders. Auguste Guidry, who is mentioned by name in one of the few surviving slave narratives from Louisiana, was my first cousin six times removed. Modeste Braud was my first cousin eight times removed. She and her husband owned many slaves in Ascension Parish. I know at least a few of my ancestors at times held a few slaves themselves, even if not on a massive plantation scale. So I do often see references to enslaved people as I comb through documents looking for clues about this or that ancestor.
The deeper I got into reading these less-utilized kinds of records for my own research (handwritten colonial documents, often in French or Spanish, conveyance documents, etc), the more I realized that not documenting the enslaved people I come across feels almost morally wrong to me.
When I first caught the genealogy bug, it didn’t take me long at all to extend my tree back to its currently known limits. Many of my lines, particularly the Acadian ones, of which there are many, have been extensively researched by historians and genealogists for hundreds of years. Linking my own lines to this body of work that has accumulated over the years was, if not trivial, certainly not anything requiring rigorous academic pursuit. A hobbyist could do it fairly easily and end up with a pretty accurate tree going back to the 1500s in many cases with very little personal investment of time or money.
For most African-Americans descended from enslaved people, the experience of tracing the family tree is wildly different. Try to go beyond your great-grandparents, and you hit a wall. The documentation just dries up. You can use DNA, but when everyone in your cousin match list is in the same boat as you are with a tree that ends abruptly around 1870 (or even later in a lot of cases), the ability to triangulate trees as a way to get further back on a line is greatly diminished. You’d have to become a genealogist and spend years learning how to research records and poring through them to find more in most cases. It’s grossly unfair. The effects of slavery continue to cascade down to us in the present day, and this is just one of the many ways that legacy continues to disadvantage the descendants of enslaved people.
Luckily, there are ways to help! We can’t wave a magic wand and make the records appear to answer all our questions, but we can share information that we come across in a way that makes it easier for people who are searching for their enslaved ancestors to find it, even without developing an all-consuming interest in digging in old archives for genealogical clues.
The best place I have found to document enslaved people is Wikitree. They actually have an entire project dedicated to this type of research, the US Black Heritage Project. Wikitree is great because 1) it’s completely free and 2) Wikitree pages come up as Google results when searching for ancestors. This makes the information contained on Wikitree easily accessible and findable by people searching for information about particular ancestors. There’s no barrier to viewing the information on Wikitree, ever. And the work being done by the USBH project is making it easier than ever to search for enslaved ancestors and locate documentary evidence relating to them. How are they doing this?
The USBH project has come up with a whole set of guidelines for documenting enslaved people on Wikitree. The key components of this documentation process that makes it so effective are properly identifying and linking profiles for enslaved people to each other and to the people who enslaved them. The outcome of this categorization and linking process is pages like this one:
This is the page for the Terrebonne Parish slaves category. By categorizing these profiles this way, a person who is trying to find their enslaved ancestors and who knows they may have lived in Terrebonne Parish can easily go here and scan the entire page for familiar names. The profiles are additionally categorized by slave owner, with similar sub-pages for viewing all the enslaved people owned by a particular person. By viewing things this way, patterns can emerge that you just won’t pick up by searching for a single enslaved ancestor at a time. You might find that, not only is the person you’re looking for listed, but they’ve been linked to their parents, because the relationship was noted on an old mortgage document and someone’s placed that information on Wikitree. This sort of analysis can enable people to make the connection between a first name on a slavery-era document and living descendants today.
Importantly, another element of the documentation process is categorizing the slave owners as such and linking them to the profiles of their slaves. This way, anyone searching for information about a particular slave owner may land on that owner’s Wikitree profile and find a link to all the information about the people they held as slaves that has been accumulated by various researchers. That’s the goal of this project. I won’t claim that the information currently available on Wikitree is in any way complete or even close to that; it isn’t. But if more people would adopt this documentation as part of their regular research process, one day it will be. I’m going to briefly go through some profiles I have worked on recently to show how this looks in practice.
I wrote a post a couple weeks ago about James Cage and Susan Randolph. I have spent some time trying to document some of the enslaved people held by James Cage, whose estate appraisal after his death included over 300 humans. My first step in this process was to categorize James Cage as a Terrebonne Parish slave owner.
Adding these categories to the top of a bio is all that is needed. One effect this has is to add the following links to the bottom of the profile:
Each link goes to a page that aggregates all the profiles tagged with that category, so you get a list of links to profiles of slave owners in Terrebonne Parish.
I also needed to add a section to James Cage’s bio to document his slaves. Because he had so many, it was clear that a new free space page was needed for documenting and linking to his slaves. If there were only a few, I’d have just linked directly on his profile in that section. It looks like this towards the bottom of the profile, right before the sources:
That link goes to a free space page I created for documenting Cage’s slaves. It doesn’t have the greatest formatting at the moment (all are free to make improvements ;-), but you can see I’ve copied all the names from Cage’s estate appraisal in here, as well as included a few names I have seen mentioned elsewhere. Sources are cited, and each name ideally would link to a Wikitree profile for that person. If you scroll through, you’ll find a few that are. These are the people I’ve managed to find documented elsewhere and written a profile for with the information I have. One of these is for John Perkins.
The reason I started with John Perkins is because in addition to the probate file, I had also found him in a newspaper article posted by James Cage. He’s also one of the few people named in the probate file that has a surname included, which is always helpful. I wanted to see if I could find anything else relating to John Perkins.
I started by searching the 1870 census in Terrebonne Parish. I found a potential match:
Cage’s probate file has John Perkins aged about 38 years in 1854. The 1830 newspaper article has him as 21 years old in 1830. So born between 1808-1816 or so. This John Perkins on the census, age 60 in 1870, would have been born in 1810, in the right range. The Cage family is actually on the previous census page.
I became even more sure this is the same John Perkins when I looked at the people in his family on the census and the names around him on Cage’s probate file. The next person on the list after John Perkins is “Lovina, aged about 35 years”. She is followed by a Henderson, age 16, and a Wilson, age 14. Wilson is also with them on the census in 1870.
I also found John and Lavinia in 1880 (at the bottom):
The reason I included more of the census page is because I noticed that my own ancestors were close neighbors to the Perkins family. There are only two households between them. I knew my ancestors lived at Woodlawn for a long time, but I thought it was pretty cool to see them while researching something quite tangential to my own research.
I found Lovinia and Wilson again on the 1900 census, still in Terrebonne Parish. John Perkins had died sometime between the 1880 and the 1900 census. Lovinia lived a very long life!
As I started searching for the names from the census, I found several trees for their descendants on Ancestry. They all end at John and Lovinia, understandably. However, with the added information from these documents found by researching their owner, we can piece together more of John Perkins’s life before 1870. We know he was in Woodville, Mississippi, about 1829, when James Cage bought him from a man named Perkins. The later census tells us that Perkins may have purchased John from someone in Virginia before selling him to Cage. Further lines of inquiry can be opened because now we know to look at records relating to William P. Perkins and Woodville, Mississippi, to try to trace John’s movements. I have not yet attempted to find him in those records (and it would be no small task), but we have learned new details of this ancestor’s story, and we know where to look to try to find more.
Information we can glean about enslaved people is often piecemeal like this. It’s only when it’s collated and aggregated in a meaningful way that we can draw lines between a person on the 1870 census and other later records and the sparse information about enslaved people contained on documents created during their enslavement. Making those connections is not easy, but it could be made a lot easier if we all took the time to document and share what we find relating to these enslaved people as we come across them.
To complete the information loop, we add similar categories to the profile of the enslaved person as we did to their owner. We also add a link to the owner’s profile and a link to the free space page for that person’s slaves. These links on both sides mean that people can easily find more information about other people who were at the same place at the same time. What we hope to see in the future is that these formerly enslaved individuals are connected to their other family members over time and are no longer floating off alone, but a part of the world tree.
It’s a lot of work, but I find it to be uniquely satisfying work and I think it’s really important. I hope more people will contribute to these sorts of efforts in the future, especially if their families possess documents that include the names of people enslaved by ancestors. Sometimes these sorts of documents are the only way to make connections between documented lines post-slavery and the people who were held as slaves.
I will take your lead and start checking my ancestors in Terrebonne Parish.
What a worthy effort and one I’ll keep in mind as I go through my own families.