When Bettye Brown found a record of her mother at age eight in a decades old census record, she was awestruck.
“I got chills,” she said.
Brown’s mother, Pinkie Jamison, died when Brown was 21. Brown is now an archivist at the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library where she spends her days going through historical documents and helping researchers track down events or people. She knows just how hard it can be to find family members in the historical record, particularly African American family members like hers. So seeing her mother preserved forever as an 8-year-old girl in a historical record was pretty amazing.
Brown knows plenty of other people who’ve had to work to track down family members. The further back people want to go in the historical record, the harder it is to find African Americans and other racial minorities. When someone comes in looking for black family members, Brown usually tells them to start with obituaries and books recording marriages. From there it’s a matter of using family names, locations and dates.
As interest in minority history grows, more African Americans are taking to libraries and archives to see if they can track down their family members, said archivist Mona Vance-Ali. In the last four or five years, she’s seen a surge of African Americans who have come to the library looking to do genealogical research.
Challenges of antebellum research
The problem is that before the abolition of slavery, enslaved African Americans didn’t have last names and didn’t usually show up in records unless it was in the context of whites, Vance-Ali said.
“[After the Civil War] they became part of the historical record as individual citizens for the first time,” she said. “Pre-Civil War, they were almost like shadows, unfortunately.”
So delving into the antebellum historical record looking for non-whites means going through old court and probate records, some of the only legal documents where slaves’ first names were mentioned.
It’s not much, but for anyone coming in to search for a particular ancestor or family, it might be just enough to make an educated guess, Vance-Ali said.
After the Civil War, many former slaves took the last names of their previous owners. So if someone looking for an ancestor knows about where that ancestor was and what the family name became, it’s possible to find them in the probate records. Wills and divisions of assets often contain the first names of slaves and who their owners are.
Students at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science doing research for history projects have used probate records in the library’s archives to find more information on African Americans in Columbus before the Civil War, Vance-Ali said. She wants African Americans looking for their ancestors to know they can do the same thing.
Court cases are another avenue to finding African Americans pre-Civil War. Archivists at the library are currently processing a collection of more than 20,000 Lowndes County Circuit Court cases from the 1820s through the 1910s. They’re only halfway done, Vance-Ali said, but hopefully when the records are organized and ready for visitors to use, African Americans can use those for research too.
Even better than legal records are plantation journals, Vance-Ali said. The library has only a handful of plantation journals, but they can be a good source for antebellum African American history when found. One such journal in the library’s archives contains a detailed list of the births, marriages and deaths of all the slaves on the plantation, down to the age and cause of death — and this at a time when slaves couldn’t even legally be married, Vance-Ali said.
‘It gives them a voice’
That plantation journal was a major historical source for a family from New Orleans who visited Columbus looking for ancestors a few months ago, Vance-Ali said.
“They came and they spent all day researching,” she said.
They found several members of their family thanks to that plantation journal, along with some other court records they went through.
Vance-Ali and Brown both stressed the importance of finding individuals from marginalized groups in historical records and how cathartic it is for people to find ancestors.
“It gives them a voice,” Vance-Ali said. “It gives them a history.
“These are challenges and real-world life experiences that people suffered or overcame, and these are things that should be acknowledged,” she added.
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