If Your Last Name Is on This List, It’s Been Buried in Plantation Records for 160 Years

Get a personalized surname report for your own name here: https://feliciatalkshistory.shop/p/pe... In 1859, a printed catalogue listed 436 people for sale outside Savannah. Every one had a first name and an age. Not one had a last name. The only surname in that document belonged to the man selling them. And that is the shape of nearly every plantation record still standing in America today. Enslaved people were entered by first name, age, and price. The surname sits on the outside of the record, not the inside. It is the label on the box, which is exactly why the box can still be found. This video covers the four kinds of paper these families left behind, and where each one lives today. Estate inventories taken at a death, which counted every person on the place in a single afternoon. Plantation journals that recorded births, deaths, and sales year after year. Bills of sale that carry a point of origin. And estate divisions, which recorded exactly where a family was split when the heirs took their shares. Then 22 surnames in four groups, with the archive that holds each family's records. The Virginia tidewater, including George Washington's 1799 census of 317 enslaved people at Mount Vernon and Robert Carter III's Deed of Gift of 1791. The Carolina and Georgia rice coast, including the Ball family papers in Charleston and the Manigault journals at Chapel Hill. The North Carolina piedmont and lake country, including the Cameron Family Papers and Somerset Place, where Dorothy Spruill Redford spent ten years in the records and brought more than 2,000 descendants back onto that ground in 1986. And the deep south cotton and sugar frontier, including the Bennet Barrow diary at Louisiana State University. It ends with the Freedmen's Bureau labor contracts of 1866, the first federal paper where a Black surname and a Black first name were written on the same line. One honest warning before you start. A surname on this list is a lead and never a proof of descent. White families carry every name on it. You match on a first name, an age, a county, an estate, and a year, and never on a surname alone. That is said plainly in the video. Get a personalized surname report for your own name here: https://feliciatalkshistory.shop/p/pe... Which of the 22 is yours, and which county? Leave both in the comments. #BlackGenealogy #AfricanAmericanHistory #FamilyHistory #FreedmensBureau #Ancestry