Question

Is there a category for black slaveholders, there seems to be one for white slaveholder.

Comments

I see a === Slave Owners === tag. It doesn't seem to indicate any other characteristics. Is there any reason to differentiate it further? What would you be trying to accomplish?

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What does the Slave Owner tag accomplish, if that is the right term?

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K Smith, the only way descendants of slaves can find their enslaved ancestors documented by name during the time of slavery is on the documents of the slave owners--usually wills, bills of sales, estate valuations, etc. Therefore it is genealogically useful to categorize slave owners by county, parish, or country so we know who in that location owned slaves and where to look for the needed records.

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I appreciate your explanation and understand the purpose to categorize. My point was to the ===Slave Owner=== tag or sticker on the profile itself. Profiles are looked up by words, not stickers. I can see where new members or new genealogists might see the sticker or tag as a way to shade their ancestors. That's just a for what it's worth observation. Some take offense to a winged cherub, others to other symbols. If the symbol or tag is viewed as offensive to even a few, the same consideration should be extended to them as other minority groups. As far as the first response, it should have been worded that there is no category for white slave owners, only slave owners.

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K, what you are showing (the “=== Slave Owners === “) is not a tag or a sticker or a category, as is. It’s a subdivision of the Biography section of a profile. I don’t believe you can do a search in WT+ for headers. The category for a person who was enslaved before 1865 identifies them as a former slave, based on documentation. The identified owner (if he/she has a profile on WT) would have the proper location category of Slave Owner. It would only show up at the bottom of the profile, not as a sticker or flag. Their profile might include a subsection (or a SpacePage) naming their identified slaves, with the source for the information.

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Adding to what Carole said, we will never have a sticker or other visual marker to "label" slave owners since that serves no purpose to genealogy. Our only purpose is to group them in a searchable way for descendants. Categories do that for us. Also, our hope is that documenting slavery becomes so common place that no one blinks an eye when they see it on a profile. It's important that this become a common place part of genealogy if descendants with enslaved ancestors are going to easily connect to their ancestors.

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Henry Howard Duvall (1804-abt.1885)  This is the type of appearance I believe the original poster was referencing and I was responding to in Davis Simpson's reply.  The sub-header does appear to call specific attention to the fact that H H Duvall was a slave owner foremost. I have read other profiles where the same information is included in it's own paragraph without appearing to label. FWIW

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That's called a heading and we use them for many, many biographies to break them into sections. It's perfectly fine to use, much like ===Military Service=== or ===Marriages=== or what have you. Adding a heading for the slave owner helps those researching their African-American ancestors. Just the other night I was watching "Finding Your Roots" and Dr. Gates found Audra McDonald's family by using the slave owner.

If you work in US Black Heritage project, you know how difficult it can be to sort out a family line, since slaves in the 1850 and 1860 census had only their gender, color, and age as identifiers.

It's not being used as a label; it's used to facilitate further research.

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That heading is also used for SEO purposes. A huge amount of people come to WikiTree through Google searches. This is why we still use the terms Slave Owner and Slaves for these headings. They are still the most searched for terms.

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i just took a look at HH Duvall's profile. He wasn't a slave owner, he was a slave. That heading is for a listing of his slave owners. Often slaves had many slave owners and they would all go under that heading.

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@K Smith. I see the problem. I'm so sorry. That profile for HH Duvall was  incorrectly categorized all the way around and unless I'm missing something, shouldn't have had the African American sticker. I've made the corrections.

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Just trying to learn. Thanks for attention to this matter and explanation.

Answer 1

We don't categorize slave owners by their race as that's not genealogically useful. It's only useful to use the slave owner category by county for all slave owners to help descendants find their enslaved ancestors. Our slave owner categories are for all slave owners regardless of race (there has never been anything documented anywhere to the contrary). Slave categories are the same. They categorize slaves regardless of race.

Comments

Adding to my answer: One of our stats people in USBH reminded us that if someone finds it useful to search for Black American slave owners (I'm assuming we're talking about Black Americans here), they can do that in WT+ using the slave owner category plus the African American sticker.

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You don't have to be constrained by WikiTree+ search limitations.  You can use google to search for any word or phrase that appears anywhere on the view page of a profile - that would include Slave Owner or Slave Holder or, for that matter, any other text.  Just start the search entry with:   wikitree.com:

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Yes! USBH uses Google to search for a lot of things. It's the fastest way to find help pages for one example.

Answer 2

First, I'll say that categories are usually only created to group large numbers of profiles, not for a handful. However, apparently there were quite a few Black Slaveholders. I found this book on Google Books (looking for something else):

Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830: Together with ... - Google Books

Comments

Written by Notable Carter Godwin Woodson (1875-1950)

Answer 3

Basic problem: Slave Owner is a well defined concept.

Being 'black' is not.  There is no clear way to define who is 'black'. There are all shades of skin colour, variants of hair, shapes of noses, etc.  The South African Apartheid government had to legally 'fix' whatever they called 'race' by simply classifying all the border-case persons, and then forbidding any mixed marriages.  Even they never succeeded in really getting their definition well-defined.

In the USA, for statistical purposes, it is usual to make use of self-identified 'race' to classify people. This means that anybody can change their 'race' at will.  It also means you cannot know the 'race' of somebody that you cannot ask anymore.

Good luck defining who would have been a 'black slave owner'.  Of course, it does seem to work for the 'obvious' cases.

Something else is when an ex-slave became a slave owner. This happened (some of my ancestors).

Comments

Race is definitely a social construct and on records (in the USA) was most often recorded by someone else (not the person being recorded). But the bottom line is, what genealogical value is there in knowing their race (especially in the USA)? Ownership was ownership and the records will be found in the same places regardless.

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Personally, I see genealogy as being all about ethnicity and the blending thereof. As for me, I am particularly interested in the of blending that has occurred in the last 400 years, in what has been coined as the "melting pot." Many of my ancestors that came to the "new world" had relatively "pure" bloodlines if that's the right phrase. Now those ancestors have descendants of multiple ethnicities and various races, me being one of many. While I agree ownership will determine where records are found, I for one, have a hard time separating genealogy from history and race from genealogy. For most people, black or white, FPOC as slave owners does not compute, yet helps tell the whole story. It is unfair to a blindman to describe an elephant one feature at a time instead of the entire beast.