They Had Names is an award-winning digital humanities project dedicated to uncovering, preserving, and sharing the lives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people in coastal Georgia Liberty and Bryan Counties.
Find an ancestor during slavery in more than 40,000 names of enslaved people during the period 1768-1865 contained in 3800+ searchable abstracts, transcripts and lists of wills, estate inventories, and deed records, plus church, court and other records.
Follow an ancestor into freedom in transcripts and lists of voter registrations, Southern Claims Commissions petitions, labor contracts, land sales, mortgages, marriages, divorces, homestead exemptions, Freedmen’s bureau records and tax records.
Whether you’re a descendant searching for family connections or other kind of researcher studying Liberty County, They Had Names provides the tools to piece together lives that might otherwise remain hidden. Every name tells a story, and every person deserves to be remembered as an individual, not as property.
What if you are not researching Liberty County? Use this site as an example of what kinds of records you might find in your own county of interest.
Everything on this site is free and always will be. Ready to start? Continue below to find out more about the various record types.
First time here? This page has answers to the most asked questions about the site, its purpose, and its use.
Search colonial and antebellum Liberty County records that contain references to 40,000+ names of enslaved people.
Search post-Civil War records on this site to find out more about your ancestors and link to them to their pre-Emancipation past.
The major record sets in this project (estate inventories, wills, deed records) are being compiled into downloadable ebooks.
Prefer to learn by listening? Listen to videos of presentations about using Liberty County records, research methods, and stories from the past.
Many of the Liberty County residents who filed U.S. Southern Claims Commission petitions after the Civil War were freedpeople. See almost 90 full transcriptions here.
Bryan County probate records seem to have disappeared, but the deed records remain, and thousands of enslaved people are named in them. Bryan County neighbored Liberty County and the boundaries were fluid. Search Bryan County records here.
Everything on this site was created by two people: Stacy Ashmore Cole, descendant of an enslaver family of Liberty County, and Cathy Tarpley Dillon, dedicated volunteer transcriber. If you’d like to learn more about what started this site, click here.
Slavery was an evil institution. Nothing on this site is intended to suggest otherwise or support any narratives of “good slaveowners.”
Reading and transcribing old handwriting is hard work and there must certainly be mistakes on these pages. The original documents are always cited and are online; please consult them before you draw any conclusions.
These are historical documents and the original wording used is often extremely offensive. Original wording is indicated with quotation marks.
