I had planned to have finished detangling the slaveowner Simon Frasers of Liberty County by now. I’ve identified three:
Simon Fraser 1 (-1812)
Simon Fraser 2 (1797-1856) (son of the above)
Simon Fraser 3 (1816-1870) (son of William Fraser)
Everything was fitting together nicely until I decided to search through the Liberty County Superior Court loose papers online, where I found one Simon Fraser’s 1835 application for U.S. citizenship, saying he’d been in Liberty County since 1802. Well, that doesn’t fit any of the above Simon Frasers.
Then I was reading through the book “A History of the Flemington Presbyterian Church.” A Simon Fraser gave the land the original church is situated on in 1832. It appears to be Simon Fraser 2, but they have him as being born in 1787. There’s a headstone in their cemetery for a Simon Fraser born in 1787 and died in 1836. Who is that?
There is either a 4th Simon Fraser, which was always a possibility, or one of us has made a mistake somewhere. Horrors.
Why does this matter? Because Simon Fraser 1 owned 121 people at his death in 1812. Simon Fraser 2 inherited people from him. Simon Fraser 3, from a separate family, owned other people. And all of them left records that name enslaved people but without the courtesy to identify themselves as 1, 2 or 3 in the records. So they need to be detangled before the people they held in slavery can be traced to their descendants.
The Simon Frasers shall be detangled, but not this week. This week I’ll be taking Tim Pinnick‘s “Building Your African American Research Toolbox” virtually through the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research (IGHR). If you want to see what I’ll get to study, click here and scroll down to Course 11. If you click on that, it has the hour-by-hour schedule.
Research Tips
Last week, I mentioned that I was going to start paging through the Liberty County Superior Court “loose papers” online. Most of the Superior Court records online are in books where the clerk has recorded documents brought to him by someone else.
However, those original documents, and other papers relating to an individual’s case, were put into alphabetical folders, and were digitized by FamilySearch in the order in which they appeared in the folders. The clerks created indexes of the primary person involved in the case and those are included in the digitization. The indexes are scattered throughout the digitization.
Confused? So was I, so I created a working aid that explains the record sets and has clickable links to the indexes. Here’s a short video that explains how to use the working aid and what you might find in these records.
https://app.screencast.com/SyglHx1OMKnUB
What I’ve Been Reading
Last week I mentioned that I was starting Herbert G. Gutman’s “The Black Family in Slavery & Freedom, 1750-1925.” I skipped ahead to chapter 6, “Somebody Knew My Name,” because I’m working on understanding the surnames freed people formally adopted at Emancipation in Liberty County. My theory, developed through research into the records, is that in the 15th District, where the large plantations were, freed people had lived in extended family groupings for generations, and many of them formally adopted a surname that was a surname of an early enslaver of their family.
Gutman confirms that this took place elsewhere as well. He argues that not only is this true, but that the conventional wisdom that enslaved people had only first names is based on the types of slaveowner documents that I research in, which were created by and for the slaveowner, and he cites many other documents showing that enslaved people carried surnames of their own choosing throughout slavery and generally concealed them from their owners.
This quote from Gutman illustrates not only the point but the agency exercised by people held in bondage:
“In fixing upon a surname belonging to an earlier owner, slaves made two statements about themselves. They rejected close identity with a new owner by keeping an older surname. More important, the retention of a former “owner’s name” paralleled in function the naming of children for slave grandparents and aunts and uncles by relating an immediate slave family (or an individual) to a slave family of origina. As time passed, an original owner’s name because a slave’s name.”
I know this did not happen in every case, because my 4th great-grandfather, John Ashmore, owned 11 people at his death in 1849. Only one, Toby, formally adopted the Ashmore surname at Emancipation, and that was because Toby was biologically an Ashmore (proven through DNA). Even though there were seven siblings in the group, each took a different surname, and in none of the cases was it the surname of a former owner. They were the surnames of prominent white men in the community. I have no idea what that means but hope to figure it out one day.
In the 17th District, which in general had small farms and merchants with much smaller numbers of enslaved people owned by any one person, it seems to have been more common for a freed person to formally adopt the surname of the last enslaver. I suspect this is because the extended family groupings necessary to pass down family history had been broken up, but more research is needed.
At any rate, a good start to the book!
Have a great week!
Stacy Ashmore Cole