They Had Names
African Americans in Early Records of Liberty and Bryan Counties, Georgia
African Americans in Early Records of Liberty and Bryan Counties, Georgia
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.
What will you find here? 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.
By using digital tools to recover individual names and stories, They Had Names bridges archival research and public history, ensuring that voices often omitted from the historical record are visible to descendants, researchers, and the wider community.
Whether you’re a descendant searching for family connections or a historian studying this community, 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.
This site includes both antebellum records naming enslaved and free African Americans and post-Civil-War records to follow them into freedom.
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 section contains a general search of the entire site to get you started. Then be sure to explore all the other options.
Search the thousands of Liberty County records here 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.
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.
These stories have emerged from the historical records and need to be told. Find the stories of a legal, interracial marriage in 1828, Liberty County enslaved people sent to Liberia, the forged 1870 census, the courage of Black voters in 1868, and more.
Find research here about particular individuals from Liberty and Bryan Counties — enslaved and free African Americans and their enslavers. The enslavers’ stories are told to help descendants of the enslaved and to tell the whole story of the past.
Even with full-site search, more help is available. The site has finding aids, research guides, a suggested reading list, and much more.
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.
In antebellum Liberty County, African Americans, enslaved and free, attended white churches, and those churches left records. Find lists of these church members.
Blog posts with research tips, announcements of new record sets, new stories, etc. Subscribe to the blog to receive emails with new posts.
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.