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Ok..Trying to help my friend do her family history?
Here is my problem....Her last name belongs to a family who's ancestors owned slaves. I am having one h*ll of a time finding records of the men,women,and children they owned. Sick I know,but I figure that would be the best place to start since her grandparents are suffering from Alzheimers.
What I am asking is..
1.Is that the best place to start?
2.If it is where do I look for these documents.I am clearly missing some where thats obvious,and will kick myself for not having thought of it myself.
please keep any nasty answers to yourself,and just list every where you can think of to find these documents.
Thanks for your help I did not have this problem when doing my own family history,and I would really like to do this for her.
2 Answers
- wendy cLv 71 decade agoFavorite Answer
No. A last name is NEVER the place to start. You start with the present, and work back from that. You use documents, to be sure of having the right individuals.. not by surname.
I am assuming that her family is in the 1870 census? That will place them in a location. Whatever the last name is.. that does not prove that the same (white) family were the owners. It happened a lot.. but not always.
They COULD be. If so, what you would be looking for are deeds and estate records, which sometimes include slaves by name. Maybe what you are missing is that this type of document is not normally on the internet. They will be at the courthouse.. also, the LDS church has films of most county records.
Nothing "sick" or nasty. If your family wasn't African American, it is just one angle of research that you did not experience. Of those families.. reality is that frequently, the records will simply not exist for her ancestry prior to the Civil War.
- BenthebusLv 61 decade ago
I do believe that http://www.ancestry.com/ has some slave registers, this is a subscription site but some library's hold a subscription so give it a go.
Good luck
