The Genealogy Guys Podcast and Vivid-Pix recently announced that I had received their Unsung Heroes Award in the “individual” category. The award is intended to recognize “those members of the genealogy community who digitize or index photos and other documents of value to genealogical researchers.”
The award was for my website, TheyHadNames.net, which I created to document the names of African Americans who lived in Liberty County, Georgia, in mostly antebellum records, to aid their descendants and researchers or historians in finding their stories. The site now has documented almost 10,000 names of African Americans–enslaved and free–from wills, estate inventories, bills of sale, collateral mortgages, deeds of gift, marriage contacts, estate settlements, church records, lists of free persons of color, and “colored orphan” bonds, in a searchable format. It also has a research guide for Liberty County.
Receiving an award for “documents of value of genealogical researchers” is about so much more than my personal pride in achievement. I started this project after researching my own slaveowner ancestors and the people they enslaved. I soon realized that in 1964, a Georgia genealogist named Judge Folks Huxford, publisher of the Georgia Genealogical Magazine, had gone through the same process. He sat at the Liberty County courthouse — I sit at my computer — and he read through every will from 1786 to 1850 and meticulously extracted every name in the wills, not just the names of the principals involved.
He extracted all the names because of course he knew that names are of extreme importance to genealogists. A genealogist wants to know if his or her ancestor was mentioned in that will, no matter in what capacity.
These were all names of white people, of course.
When I started reading the wills for myself, I realized that most of the wills also contained the names of enslaved people. Judge Huxford only included the names of African-American slaves if there was something unusual about the bequest, and often did not even say that slaves were mentioned in the will, only referring to “property.”
That was 1964. It was 2018 when I realized his omission, when I realized that each of the descendants of those African Americans would have to page through each and every one of hundreds of documents to find them.
I thought — I assumed — that someone must have already done this documentation in the years since 1964, but I searched, and asked everyone I could find, and it appears not.
There are so many things that need doing, and we each have to decide what is the thing that we cannot walk away from. This was mine.
I started the website with the idea of restoring the names omitted from the summaries of the Liberty County wills to the historical record, but just kept finding more documents naming — NAMING — African Americans.
Sometimes people think that these records are not of value for African-American research because they contain only the first name of the enslaved people but there is so much that can be gleaned through careful documentation. For an example of what I’ve learned about the 11 people my 4th great-grandfather enslaved from finding them in his will, see this blog post.
Last month another researcher — Cathy Dillon, also a retired federal civil servant — joined me, and has been transcribing names from early estate inventories, adding hundreds of names in just a short time. From these names, descendants of Liberty County’s enslaved African Americans can find their history.
In 1964, these names were not “of value” to the Georgia Genealogical Magazine. In 2019, Drew Smith and George Morgan (The Genealogy Guys) and Rick Voight and Randy Fredlund (Vivid-pix.com) have said loud and clear that all names have value, and that two people working at a home computer on documents available online can produce work “of value to the genealogical community.”
Thanks so much to The Genealogy Guy and Vivid-pix.com for their generosity in creating this award. If you’re not already listening to The Genealogy Guy’s podcasts and reading their blog, you’re missing out! Vivid-pix is software designed to make photo restoration simple and easy. You can sign up for a free trial of their software here.
If you’d like to keep up with additions to TheyHadNames.net, you can follow us on Facebook or on Twitter (@theyhadnames1).
Anyone with basic computer knowledge and good typing skills can do this kind of work. This is just a formatted blog. If you’re interested in starting a similar project, please contact me at ashmorefamilyhistory@gmail.com.
Stacy Ashmore Cole is a retired federal civil servant who lives in Brunswick, Georgia. She is president of the Coastal Georgia Genealogical Society, and on the Liberty County Midway Museum‘s Board of Governors.