How to find if a given ancestor was a slave holder.

Question

My cousin has asked me which of our direct ancestors were slave holders.  I have a list (about 100) of several generations of direct ancestors on WikiTree, but I don't know how to find out if they were slave holders.  Family lore indicates that many were.  

To get a head start, I've separated my list to show which ancestors were born or died in slave states and which were born and died in non-slave states or outside the US.  

How do I find (and use) documents about slavery?

My next question will be: How to properly document my findings on their profiles.

Answer 1

https://apps.wikitree.com/apps/ashley1950/ancestorexplorer/
I did a quick search using the Ancestor Explorer app, entered your ID, 15 generations, and chose the option "Bio text" and put "slave" in the search box.
You should repeat the search with words like "negro" etc, to catch all ancestor profiles mentioning enslaved people.

I then went through the names and found some slave owners. I did this very quickly, you should go through all of the names in the search result again, thoroughly.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/White-6713
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Bryant-5876
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Danner-269
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/David-232
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Wilson-34856
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Wilson-34860
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Lubbertz-1
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Roelofse-4
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Vanderbilt-11

I tried a similar search in the Ancestor Explorer app, entered your ID, 15 generations, and chose the option "Category text" and put "slave" in the search box, and found these belonging to slave owner categories:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/White-6713
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Claesz-43
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/De_Mandeville-42

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To find more go for the lowest hanging fruit first. In your spreadsheet, go through your ancestors in the slave states, focus first on the ancestors who owned a lot of land, it is more likely they were slave owners than not.

There are a lot of resources out there for finding enslaved ancestors and slave owner ancestors, many resources are the same.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Slavery%2C_United_States_of_America
https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2016/01/did_your_family_own_slaves_new.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_slave_owners
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:African-American_Genealogy_Resources#Large_Slave_Owners
https://www.geni.com/projects/American-slave-owners/11457
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-slavery-lawmakers-overview/

You will find enslaved people in property deeds, tax records, wills, probate records, census documents, etc:

https://statelibrary.ncdcr.gov/genealogy-and-family-history/family-records/records-enslaved-people
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/hidden-histories/3/
https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/United_States_Census_Slave_Schedules

Comments

Interesting app. Thanks for sharing that.

Answer 2

Hi Peggy, thank you for your question. I suggest you create a spreadsheet of all the ones you suspect might be slave owners. I would organize them according to the years they were alive and the states they might have held slaves. 

Then you can search census records for the years they were alive from 1820 - 1840 where the number of enslaved are listed. You can also search for them in the 1850 and 1860 Slave schedules if they were alive during those years. Note the slavery information on the spreadsheet.

Wills and inventories of estates will often give you the named enslaved people who were bequeathed to an heir. So search for those. Create a column for the links to wills/inventories or other sources that you will need.

Once you've done that, please follow these instructions for documenting those slave owners on WikiTree

Finally, feel free to reach out to the US Black Heritage Project for any further assistance.

Comments

If there are others in your list that do not show up on WikiTree  with the category, then you will have to search for them separately or create their profile. Be sure to add the slave owner category for the county and state in which they held enslaved people.

Answer 3

Slaves were manumitted in the British West Indies during the 1830s when the British government paid slave owners to free the slaves. Some slave owners had already done so prior to the general manumission. For example, Benjamin Barnett (Barnett-5457), who passed away before Mar. 1821, freed his slaves before his death.

Records of enslavement and manumissions can be found in FamilySearch.org. For example, search on "Bahamas" and select groups 4, 5, 6, or 7. The titles of image collections will be displayed. For example:

https://www.familysearch.org/records/images/image-details?page=6&place=214&rmsId=TH-909-70512-46438-34

This is not necessarily the most efficient way to search, but if you depend on digitized documents, you may miss a significant amount of source material that is available in image form only.

Another way to find slave holders is to check their occupations and the years in which they were alive. For example, in 1810, a plantation owner was likey to have had slaves, but a taxi driver in 1870 was not.

Regarding how to document the findings, make sure you include the entire citation that would enable another genealogist to access the source document. This includes a description of the document as well as a link to the URL where it is online. If the document is not online, document the title, author, date of publication, page numbers, publisher, and any other information available. Sources are so important, it is best to secure the source before making changes in profiles, if at all possible.

Answer 4

Thank you D Bruno, Gina Jarvi and Marion Ceruti for your help.

I now have 83 slaveholder candidates using the techniques D and Marion suggested.  They are in a spreadsheet as Gina suggested with the following column headings: A) Slaveholder (YNM); B) Slaves; C) Ancestor App Text; D) Doc citations; E) Landowner?; F) Property deeds?; G) Tax records?; H) Will & probate?; I) Census & occupation?; J) Family Search docs?; K) Slaveholder profile updated; L) Enslaved profiles created; M) Category (holder, enslaved, location); N) Name; O) Wikitree id; P) Birth date; Q) Birth town, city, county; R) Birth state, country; S) Death date; T) Death town, city, county; U) Death state, country; V) Residence State, country.

Hopefully, most of the cells A-M & V will just be reminder placeholders.  In cases where there is information found, it'll go into the cell.  Cells N-U have been filled in already. State & country columns are isolated to simplify sorting. And they indicate (S)lave or (N)on-slave states.

Have I overlooked anything?

Should I document profiles with sources that show non-slave holding? For example, my 2GGF named his son for an abolitionist ancestor who inherited slaves and set them free except for the boy he freed, adopted, and treated as a son.

Comments

Wow, ambitious! That spreadsheet seems really well planned. Happy that my answer helped.

"document profiles with sources that show non-slave holding?"
Absolutely! Especially in places and times where this was rare, and it was completely normal for everybody who had the means to be a slave owner.

And when quickly scanning through some of your ancestors there was one I included in the list, where it said he bought enslaved people to set them free, that sounds like a very interesting ancestor?

Being set free was not safe though, it was easy to end up in a situation where you could get re-enslaved again. There are many examples of families where one family member bought other family members and did NOT set them free because they were safer that way.

Obviously, all non-slave states were originally at some point also slave states/colonies/territories in the 1600s and 1700s.

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Hi Peggy, I am so glad we all have been helpful. This is an ambitious project and it is also a very important part of the US Black Heritage Project's work. Creating the slave owner profiles means you are now heading into slavery work and our project has some specific requirements that I would like to share. So I am going to PM you with some instructions that will help you and our project get the most out of your efforts.

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Not much to add to what has already been stated.  I have been researching my slave owning ancestors, the slaves and their descendants for a couple of years now, and it has been an education.

I should warn you that you will probably learn some things that are very uncomfortable, but it is also very rewarding.

The 1850 and 1860 Slave Schedules have already been mentioned, but they are very helpful.  Also, the 1860 Census has a column for value of real estate and value of personal property.  My ggg uncle, for example, in 1860 owned no real estate, but he had personal property of $2200 (mostly slaves).