If your family is from the South

[saraha]

On 4/20/2024 at 8:21 AM, DawnM said:

Did your family own people during slavery?

Mine did.    Well, my mom's side is from SC and they had slaves.   Not many, as they weren't very wealthy, but they had some.

Dad's family was not from the South and never owned people and were very outspokenly against it.

I wish I could find more information about those times in my family's history.   Someone did write some things down but I haven't seen it.   And I have heard some of his writings are inaccurate, but I would still like to see if there are any names or anything in there.

I really hope their slave's dependents are doing well and thriving now.   

Just my Saturday morning musings.

I work at an Underground Railroad house and in our filing cabinets we have tons of information that isn’t made public online, but people can come in and ask about their families and we do our best to chase them down. The small town the house is in also has a tiny town museum and they have what must be 100 bankers boxes of paper all about the towns history and families, non online of course. The librarian in the same town is an amateur historian and she has boxes of old family records and stuff, including stacks of property transfer ledgers. I wonder if you could contact someone in the town you are interested in and find someone willing to help? One of my assigned summer projects is to start scanning to a usb all of the paper work we have. In these three places the little town is sitting on a gold mine of information that you can only access through a group of retired ladies

ETA: if you are interested I mean. I was shocked at all the primary sources we have available if you know who to ask. It is very hyper local though

Edited April 21 by saraha

[Rosie_0801]

2 hours ago, katilac said:

An 8-yr-old asking what's the worst thing you've ever done was a major moment of horror, revulsion, and shame?

What have you been up to?

Some people just have overactive empathy genes.

[CTVKath]

It's a troubling thing to think about. All sides of my family are from the South and I'm sure there must have been some that owned slaves. We do know of one for sure. Some of my family were wealthy, some poor, some pastors, a lot of small family farmers, some sharecroppers. Although both sides of the family are in the deep South for the last couple of hundred years, they spread back to Virginia in the 1700s and possibly late 1600s. As we spread back that far, I'm sure different branches owned slaves. I'm also sure there were a lot that didn't.

One of our main genealogist family members is a member of the Sons of the Confederacy, participates in Civil War reenactments and will tell anyone who listens that most of our family fought to protect their families and their homes and not for slavery. He says we didn't own slaves yet he also found the town pass one of our ancestors had written and signed for their slave. To make it worse, the town pass was dated 3 days after the Civil War ended. It's horrifying. 

How do I wrap my brain around all of this? I haven't. It's been 20 years since I learned of the town pass and I still haven't been able to understand how they thought it was ok to own a person. But you know what? Until I learned of that town pass, it had never occurred to me to ask whether branches of my family had owned slaves or not. When I researched my family, I was looking for births, deaths and names of my family and searching backwards. I never thought to look for any other records and what they might tell me about those people.

Thank you, Amira, for posting the information about logging enslaved peoples names to help their descendants research. I haven't worked on genealogy since before my kids were born but if I go back to it, I will look for that information and try to get it logged if I find it.

[Farrar]

Yes.

And I think it's an important question. More than 20 years ago I had an experience with this question that made me think about it in a new way. I was participating in one of these get to know people activities in my graduate group. It was where people take turns in the center of the circle and say something (anything from "I love pizza" to "I lost my mother to cancer") and anyone who shares that experience goes to the middle. We had been doing a lot of deep discussion and reading around race and education. So one person went to the center and said "some of my ancestors were enslaved." And some people joined them. So I went to the center and said, "some of my ancestors enslaved people." And no one joined me.

And I don't think it's because there was a lack of people with ancestors who enslaved people. I think it was a lack of awareness and a purposeful move not to know on the part of white folks. I think there's a desire to bury this question and I think that says something about us. For people whose ancestors were enslaved, they often don't have a choice not to grapple with that history. It's in their genes, it's still impacting society and culture. So I think it's my job to be frank and aware that this is in my history as well on the other side. And I think more people than realize it share that history as well.

I highly recommend Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family to anyone from the south. It's an older book and I haven't read it in awhile, but I think it would probably hold up. Ball's ancestors were large scale enslavers in South Carolina and he writes frankly about trying to confront the myth of the "good" slave owner. He undertook a really serious research project to write the book.

My own ancestors included early European settlers in this country in New York and Virginia. Both of those branches enslaved people. One branch ended up in Tennessee and continued enslaving people up to the Civil War. That family also had a very dubious relationship where they "adopted" a young African American girl who became a family servant living entirely off the will of my ancestors from what I can tell. She eventually helped raise my grandfather and died when my mother was a child, living in poverty. My grandfather, I think it's worth clearing up, also grew up in poverty. But white poverty and Black poverty are not the same thing in this country.

I agree with others objecting to comparing slavery as practiced in the Americas with Black Africans to slavery in history in general. It's not that you can't compare them at all, but there's a way that bringing that up in every discussion minimizes the particular elements of slavery in the Americas. And slavery in the American south is the one that we're all closest to in all kinds of ways.

[maize]

4 minutes ago, Farrar said:

 And slavery in the American south is the one that we're all closest to in all kinds of ways.

It's worth keeping in mind that this is an international group.

The history of slavery in the United States (and before that in the North American colonies) is indeed exceptionally relevant to ongoing realities of life and politics in the United States.

It isn't what is most relevant or significant for every person in the world.

I'm also one who thinks that more context is usually more helpful than less; nothing happens in a historical or cultural vacuum. The United States has never, ever, been isolated from larger world trends and affairs. 

[YaelAldrich]

I am the descendant of enslaved people. My great grandmother's grandmother was a slave. I remember so distinctly the awe I had from being around her and knowing I was talking to and touching a woman who also talked to and touched an enslaved woman. 

I'm also Jewish (converted) so we talk about how we (Jews) were once slaves. I feel that most Jews don't really know what it means. I don't know that I know better, but I know I'm intimately connected to slavery in a way most Jewish people are not.

[Ellie]

I have ancestors on both parents' sides in Virginia and the Carolinas for 10 generations, so probably. As a member of DAR, United Daughters of the Confederacy, and Colonial Dames, I have learned quite a bit not only about my ancestors but also about early American history, much of it not what I learned in the 50s in Virginia, which was still recovering from "Reconstruction."

[YaelAldrich]

My children are simultaneously ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) AND DAR AND Jewish. That's America!

[DawnM]

13 hours ago, saraha said:

I work at an Underground Railroad house and in our filing cabinets we have tons of information that isn’t made public online, but people can come in and ask about their families and we do our best to chase them down. The small town the house is in also has a tiny town museum and they have what must be 100 bankers boxes of paper all about the towns history and families, non online of course. The librarian in the same town is an amateur historian and she has boxes of old family records and stuff, including stacks of property transfer ledgers. I wonder if you could contact someone in the town you are interested in and find someone willing to help? One of my assigned summer projects is to start scanning to a usb all of the paper work we have. In these three places the little town is sitting on a gold mine of information that you can only access through a group of retired ladies

ETA: if you are interested I mean. I was shocked at all the primary sources we have available if you know who to ask. It is very hyper local though

I would need to see if anything like that exists.   I live about 3 hours away from where my mom grew up.   

[DawnM]

On 4/20/2024 at 3:30 PM, Bootsie said:

I asked the questions because I know more people who did not have family in the South who definitely know that their ancestors held slaves (and some who know that their families profitted greatly from the slave trade or slave labor) than people I know of in the south.  

While at the beginning of the Civil War, states in the south had more slaves than states in the north, that is a very small snapshot of the horrid situation.  Slavery was (and is) a problem irregardless of one's geographical location.   And, the impact of slavery often goes far beyond the location of where I slave is actually being held.  

If you look at the link I posted, you can see why I focused on the South.   

[Farrar]

12 hours ago, maize said:

It's worth keeping in mind that this is an international group.

The history of slavery in the United States (and before that in the North American colonies) is indeed exceptionally relevant to ongoing realities of life and politics in the United States.

It isn't what is most relevant or significant for every person in the world.

I'm also one who thinks that more context is usually more helpful than less; nothing happens in a historical or cultural vacuum. The United States has never, ever, been isolated from larger world trends and affairs. 

The OP asked specifically for responses from people with ancestry in the American south.

[maize]

2 hours ago, Farrar said:

The OP asked specifically for responses from people with ancestry in the American south.

True.

[stephanier.1765]

My family came to America as indentured servants. So better off than the enslaved and never wealthy enough to own anyone past the time of their service to their master. No one further down the genealogy line did, either.

[Dmmetler]

My direct branch, no. Not in the US, anyway. However, in the US, my maiden name is more common in Black people than White people due to one particular person who had a plantation in Louisiana and registered all his slaves with his last name. The name was a focus of a dissertation in the 1980's because everyone with that name traces back to a foundlings home in France, meaning the original "family" isn't related at all, but because it was a fairly small group, it was actually possible to trace pretty closely. In the US, there are two subgroups-mine, which was midwestern farmers who came by way of Eastern Europe around WWI, and the Black descendants of slaves.  I met one of my "cousins" in college-the first time either of us had ever run into anyone with our name who wasn't from our family (as in the sense of "second cousin once removed..."), and we both kind of enjoyed sharing family history-and confusing people who couldn't figure out how we were "cousins". (We adopted that term in part because it confused people-and because his grandmother seemed really happy to find another "cousin", even if she was a skinny white girl from Virginia who's grandparents had been Iowa farmers. )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Scarlett]

32 minutes ago, stephanier.1765 said:

My family came to America as indentured servants. So better off than the enslaved and never wealthy enough to own anyone past the time of their service to their master. No one further down the genealogy line did, either.

Did they settle in GA?

[maize]

34 minutes ago, Dmmetler said:

My direct branch, no. Not in the US, anyway. However, in the US, my maiden name is more common in Black people than White people due to one particular person who had a plantation in Louisiana and registered all his slaves with his last name. The name was a focus of a dissertation in the 1980's because everyone with that name traces back to a foundlings home in France, meaning the original "family" isn't related at all, but because it was a fairly small group, it was actually possible to trace pretty closely. In the US, there are two subgroups-mine, which was midwestern farmers who came by way of Eastern Europe around WWI, and the Black descendants of slaves.  I met one of my "cousins" in college-the first time either of us had ever run into anyone with our name who wasn't from our family (as in the sense of "second cousin once removed..."), and we both kind of enjoyed sharing family history-and confusing people who couldn't figure out how we were "cousins". (We adopted that term in part because it confused people-and because his grandmother seemed really happy to find another "cousin", even if she was a skinny white girl from Virginia who's grandparents had been Iowa farmers. )

My  last name is crazy common, including among Black Americans. When we lived in California the Black family next door shared our last named and we told everyone we were cousins. Definitely caused some confusion!

[Condessa]

I have ancestors who owned a slave plantation, until the Mormon missionaries showed up.  They converted, freed their slaves, and headed west to Utah.  Some of their slaves also converted and went west, and my Grandma met one of their decendents at an auto shop once and had a neat conversation about family history.  

[maize]

I've been researching the branch of my family from South Carolina since yesterday and can find no evidence of slave ownership--they were far too poor. There was mostly no property ownership at all, including land. They moved frequently trying to make a life for themselves, heading further and further west.

Edited April 22 by maize

[maize]

I've also been contemplating the harsh reality that the group of contemporary Americans who have the highest probability of having slave-owning ancestors are probably those Black Americans who are themselves descendants of slaves. Powerful men spreading their own genes far and wide is another of the universal realities of human history.

[stephanier.1765]

2 hours ago, Scarlett said:

Did they settle in GA?

No, KY, eventually. Three brothers served in the Revolution and earned a large land grant there. So while they had land and the community that eventually grew up there (Ellisburg) was named after the family, they were never well off.

[pinball]

5 hours ago, Dmmetler said:

My direct branch, no. Not in the US, anyway. However, in the US, my maiden name is more common in Black people than White people due to one particular person who had a plantation in Louisiana and registered all his slaves with his last name. The name was a focus of a dissertation in the 1980's because everyone with that name traces back to a foundlings home in France, meaning the original "family" isn't related at all, but because it was a fairly small group, it was actually possible to trace pretty closely. In the US, there are two subgroups-mine, which was midwestern farmers who came by way of Eastern Europe around WWI, and the Black descendants of slaves.  I met one of my "cousins" in college-the first time either of us had ever run into anyone with our name who wasn't from our family (as in the sense of "second cousin once removed..."), and we both kind of enjoyed sharing family history-and confusing people who couldn't figure out how we were "cousins". (We adopted that term in part because it confused people-and because his grandmother seemed really happy to find another "cousin", even if she was a skinny white girl from Virginia who's grandparents had been Iowa farmers. )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4 hours ago, maize said:

My  last name is crazy common, including among Black Americans. When we lived in California the Black family next door shared our last named and we told everyone we were cousins. Definitely caused some confusion!

I have relatives who are different races than me…people seem to grasp how we can be related without “confusion”

[AmandaVT]

Not from the South, but newspapers.com can be a good source to find a ton of information about your family history. My mom, who is very into genealogy and has traced our family tree back to somewhere in the 1500s - I think the late 1500s. It's really neat to look at some of the documents she was able to match to our tree. It's wild to see ancestors born in RI in the 1600s - even though I "know" people were there then, it's still hard to wrap my head around. 

My dad's side of the family came to the US during the Chicago World's Fair in 1893—and they brought Arabian horses, which is really cool. We've been able to find a picture of a great-great (maybe one more great?) grandfather on his horse. 

[kbutton]

On 4/20/2024 at 12:40 PM, Faith-manor said:

You are so right.

It should also be noted that while Americans tend to think of slavery as a fairly exclusive practice perpetrated against the peoples of West Africa, the colonies also heavily enslaved captured Native Americans as well as the peoples of Haiti and other Caribbean islands. It appears that in New England by the mid-1700's, up to a third of the population of Native Americans were slaves or "servants" sentenced to very long periods of servitude to white families. So probably an awful lot of ancestors of "not the south" may have owned slaves.

Some of my ancestral line is documented well (no slaves mentioned, but it was in a book where that would be selected against in sharing information), but I haven’t stopped to trace my exact path in a long time, and the book documenting them starts with a specific couple and fans out in time toward me, so lots of lines are documented parallel to my own. Since my ancestors fought in wars with the Pequot (IIRC) in “King Phillip’s” war (IIRC), I assume my ancestors were tangled up in plenty of not pretty stuff that might include this.

I read somewhere a few years ago that many native men were shipped to the Caribbean as slaves as a punishment after King Phillip’s war (again if I have the right name for the conflict). They have descendants there to do this day. It’s possible my ancestors were involved in such things.

Many New England families owned slaves—Sojourner Truth was enslaved by a Dutch family in NY, if I remember right.

One section of my family is from the South, which was news to me about a decade ago. Supposedly from an illegitimate descendant of either Lewis or Clark of expedition fame (have not seen this information, but a relative who does genealogy dug it up), so I would guess that the answer is yes to enslavers as ancestors.

One section of the family came from England in the 1800s, and they could have been enslavers, but I think that ancestor was super poor.

The rest of mine are from Poland in the late 1900s.

DH found out he is descended from a close relative of a notorious Southern general who was a notorious slaver. That was a surprise. Almost assuredly a yes for his ancestry.

DH also has a fairly recent ancestor from OK/TX area that said not to look into family history based on his own personal actions before leaving for CA in a hurry—the imagination runs wild.

I’ve seen enough Finding Your Roots that I hope if someone arrived on our porch or calls us someday with tales of enslavement and/or shared ancestry, I won’t respond with total shock. 

[Lady Florida.]

Not from the south but no. I don't have a lot of information about my dad's side but general family lore is they (both his paternal and maternal side) came from Ireland during the famine. It's possible his paternal side went to Canada first. They all settled in the northeast and were too busy being poor immigrants to own people. 

My mom's side (again both paternal and maternal) came from Italy in the late 19th century. We have papers from her maternal grandmother's family coming to Ellis Island in 1885. We don't have details about her grandfather's side but it was around the same time. They all stayed in the NY-NJ area.

Dh's family likely did but probably very distant relations. Both his parents can trace their families back to some time in the early 1700s and both families went to the south - Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. His branch of both families settled in Tennessee and seem to have been the poor relations. It's not impossible that a direct ancestor of his owned slaves but there's no actual information that anyone can find and all seem to have been fairly poor. FIL was very into ancestry research and I'm pretty sure he would have mentioned if he found anything. He wasn't afraid to confront such truths so he wouldn't have hid the information if he found it.

[goldberry]

How would you know or find this out?  I've never seen anything on ancestry.com.  My dad's side fought for the confederacy in the Civil War, but his more recent ancestors would have been too poor.  His grandfather and father both were sharecroppers.  Very poor white families living in dirt-floor shacks.

[maize]

2 hours ago, AmandaVT said:

Not from the South, but newspapers.com can be a good source to find a ton of information about your family history.

Newspapers can be interesting for sure--including for turning up some of the more colorful bits of family history! Years ago, I was researching the G-G-Grandmother I was named after and found a whole juicy scandal that she was involved in, complete with eloping with her then-husband's hired man and heading for Mexico with him and her children.

She led an interesting and repeatedly traumatic life, including 6 marriages, 2 divorces, being widowed 4 times, and the deaths of several children--one scalded to death as a child when the family was processing a slaughtered pig, an adult daughter who drowned in a river when she was several months pregnant with her first child, and an adult son shot to death by his father-in-law who supposedly mistook him for an intruder. 

It's hard to idealize the past if you have spent any time at all investigating the lives of individuals and families who lived in any period of history.

[fairfarmhand]

15 minutes ago, maize said:

 

It's hard to idealize the past if you have spent any time at all investigating the lives of individuals and families who lived in any period of history.

This is the truth. People talk about the fools old days whem people stayed married and children obeyed their parents and blah blah blah. It was not like that. My paternal great grandfather was a scoundrel. I find him in census records living with various women over the decades.
 

The my great grandmother (his wife) with seemed to have lived a terribly hard life. She was listed as a seamstress, maid, and house cleaner in a poor part of town. Her mother lived with her and her three children that the scoundrel had with her. Sometimes she was even caring for some of his other children in her home while he was living with another lady. 
 

 

[Mackswife44]

On 4/20/2024 at 3:42 PM, Amira said:

Without reducing in any way the abuse and discrimination faced by Irish and other especially marginalized white immigrants, I don’t think it’s reasonable to compare what they experienced with what enslaved black people experienced. There are similarities on the labor side, but there is no comparison when you look at family relationships.

White people of any ethnicity in the US never faced wholesale denial of their family relationships. There are certainly individual example of white people losing custody of their children unjustly or being forcibly separated from family members, but it was never codified like it was for black people who were enslaved.  

Thank you for saying this!!! I never post, just read, but what you stated is very correct. As a descendant of African American slaves, the oppression can't be compared to other groups that went through discrimination. It's not to say that what the Irish, Italians, etc., experienced at the hands of others is to be taken lightly, not at all. However, they didn't experience chattel slavery for 250 years and another 150 + odd years of Jim Crow (which was an extension of chattel slavery). My parents, mother-in-law, aunts, uncles, and older cousins, who are still alive today, lived through Jim Crow. The stories are horrendous, and in many case, they're not talked about.

I have family that I have found on plantations in Deleware and New York, so slavery wasn't just in the South. Not to mention, other African Americans that were well off would purchase other African Americans, but they were usually loved ones of theirs or people that they considered as family. They purchased them to free them and not to further enslave them.

As many mentioned, slavery was all over the world, however chattel slavery was mainly in the Western part of the world. From my research, I wouldn't compare that to indentured servitude. 

[Rosla]

It's great that you are honestly talking about your ancestors. I know that I have ancestors in Wales. And it won't be easy but I'm thinking about creating a family tree. Fortunately, we have the Internet and special genealogy services. I'm going to contact legacy tree genealogists customer service in the hope they help me find out more about my family.

Edited Thursday at 04:21 PM by Rosla

[TechWife]

My dad’s family was from Virginia. I have no idea whether or not they owned slaves. My mother’s parents were not born in the US.