Ancestry.com IS for Black People: The True Story of How to Research African American Family History - Part II
“Ancestry.com is not for black people.” Social media channels have echoed this refrain for years, metonymizing Ancestry.com, one of the world’s largest online genealogy databases, to assert that African American lineage research is impossible. This theory rests on the idea that the paper trail for African American families – at least before 1870, the year the US Census began listing all African Americans by name - remains too faint to trace. Nothing could be more wrong.
Tracing Free People of Color Ancestors
Not every person of African descent in pre-emancipation America endured cradle-to-grave chattel slavery. The Americans enumerated in the 1860 US Census included 476,748 free people of color, people whose names, locations, households, and sources of income appear not only in the United States Census, but also in a bevy of other federal, state, and local documents that, when analyzed and collated, deepen and complicate our understanding of the American experience. Free people of color included indentured African servants and former slaves emancipated by former slaveholders, people free by birth and people freed by edict. Indentured servitude required contracts just as manumission required petitions; researchers can retrieve these records from state and local repositories.
A subset of free-born people of color originated from African men (both slaves and freedmen) who sired children with European-American women. The children born of such couples inherited their freedom from their mothers. The prohibition of marriages between African-American men and European-American women created a state of legal and economic vulnerability for the brood of these forbidden couplings; some jurisdictions required these out-of-wedlock or “base-born” offspring to be “bound” to local planters via unpaid apprenticeships until they reached the age of majority. The legal binding not only produced additional free labor for rural America’s planter class, but also mandated documentation of kinship and social conditions among free African American communities – crucial data points for contextualizing lineage and reconstructing lives.
On the 8th of June 1815, a Lunenburg County, Virginia court justice “ordered that the overseers of the poor do bind out Richard Edmunds to William Laffoon, according to law.” At the time, Richard Edmunds, my maternal 4x great-grandfather, was a six-year-old free person of color. Virginia marriage records show Richard Edmunds married my 4x great-grandmother, Mourning Laffoon, the free mulatto daughter of Daniel Laffoon of Lunenburg County, Virginia, on the 6th of January 1831. Laws regulating free people of color required Richard Edmunds to register as “Dick Edmond…about 30 years of age, yellow complexion, a finger on the left hand off. No. 105” on "A list of Free Negroes and Mulattos Registered in the County of Lunenburg, Virginia, from 1815 to 1850," on 9 December 1839.
Archived records of free people of color not only facilitate ancestral research, but also demonstrate the historic tenuousness of “freedom” for Americans of African descent. Free people of color could lose their liberty for failing to produce documentation of their legal status or for becoming financially insolvent. Manumission records, freedom petitions, mandatory free Negro registries, apprenticeship documents, bastardy bonds, runaway apprentice advertisements, and re-enslavement petitions illustrate how free Africans in America - whether free by birth or liberated by judicial process – still lived along a spectrum of unfreedom. That tight-rope of surveillance and regulation generated detailed documentation illuminating how free African American families navigated a precarious legal purgatory in a pre-Civil War era where freedom was never truly free.
