Hurricane Idalia and some volunteer work for the Georgia Genealogical Society briefly stalled work on They Had Names so no progress this week.
I did add a section to the site with tips for searches. Did you know that you can narrow your search to just the name you’re looking for? For example, let’s say you’ve discovered that Richard Baker was the enslaver of your ancestor. If you enter Richard Baker into the site search bar, you will get every record that has Richard and Baker — a large number of documents that are not the ones you’re seeking.
Here’s how to get what you are looking for:
You want: Richard Baker (exactly that name)
Search for: “Richard Baker” (adding the quotes will give you documents that have that exact string of characters)
You want: Richard Baker, but you want to leave room for a middle initial, and you’re not sure what it is.
Search for: Richard Baker -n2 (Richard and Baker within two words of each other. This will get you Richard F. Baker, Richard S. Baker, etc, and you can start the process of figuring out which one is the Richard Baker you’re looking for.
Research Snippets
Last week, I was doing some research involving Lewis Hines, whose family is the “Hines” in “Hinesville”. On the site already I had his 1840 will, and estate inventories and divisions from 1841, 1847, 1854, and 1855. Estates would be re-inventoried and divided every time an heir came of age, so the process could continue over many years for a man who died leaving young heirs. One of the estate inventories was for his property, including enslaved people, in Bryan County. Many Liberty County planters had property in Bryan County but unfortunately few early records from Bryan County have survived, so it was a stroke of luck that this one was recorded in Liberty County.
On the face of it, it seemed that I had a good number of documents to use in tracing Lewis Hines’ involvement in slavery in the hopes of tracing what happened to the people he held in slavery. Like most of the estate inventories, it was just a list of first names.
Then I thought to check the loose papers. These are folders held at the courthouse with all the “loose” papers pertaining to an individual, and fortunately they were digitized and put online by FamilySearch and Ancestry. They are not indexed (yet) so you have to browse through them page by page. They are divided into alphabetical groups and scattered within them are typewritten indexes created by the court staff. Some time ago, I browsed through all the thousands of pages looking for those indexes, and created a finding aid with hyperlinks to them. So if you know you’re looking for Lewis Hines, you can use the finding aid to see if there is a folder for him, and access it quickly.
There was a folder for Lewis Hines. It turns out that he left a lot of debts when he died. His estate executor, his brother Charlton Hines, spent a lot of time satisfying the debts, then finally came along Michael Prendergast, who sued the estate for get payment for his debt. Charlton Hines had to go through everything he had done to prove that there was nothing (and no one) left in the estate to satisfy this debt. In doing so, he filed a statement with the court listing everything and everybody, and included their relationships to each other. So now, instead of a cold list of names, we have this:
“…said last mentioned three several promissory notes being secured by a mortgage dated to wit on the said twenty-fifth day of June in the year [1840] on the following named negro slaves, with their increase to wit: Mary, John, Scipio, Hillington, Joshua, John and Phebe, and their four children Simon, Daniel, Emily and Caesar; Stephen, Ben; Joe and Peggy and their four children Sulphur, Sarah, Isiah and Henry, Daphne and her six children, Charlotte, Jacob, Cate [or Cato], Eliza, Sarah and Hagar…”
It is always wonderful to find the relationship between a mother and her children identified. It is exceedingly rare in these documents to find a father’s relationship to his children identified. Now we know that John and Phebe had four children, and we know their names, and that Joe and Peggy also had four children.
In the court document, we also find that John Pray Hines claimed enslaved people from Lewis Hines’ estate, based on the will of John Pray, and this claim reveals more relationships:
“…also except the following named negro slaves claimed [image 649] by one Luke Mann as trustee under an alleged marriage settlement made by and between the said Lewis Hines, Mary Jane Pray Sleigh, afterwards, Mary Jane Pray Hines, now deceased, John Pray also since deceased and the said Luke Mann, to wit on the fifteenth day of January in the year [1819]: to wit, Ben Rhina, and the latter’s children John and Abigail; and the children of Abigail, Frank, William, Amos, Emmick and Scipio; and except also the following named negro slaves claimed by one John Pray Hines under the will of the before named John Pray, deceased, dated to wit on the fifth day of February in the year [1819] to wit: Lizett [alt: Lisset] and her children Jane, Stephen, Lavinia Washington Dublin and Peter; Charles and Flora, and their children Robin, Bob, Theresa, Sally, Charles, Alvira [alt: Elvira] and Rufus; Clarinda and her children Simon, Johnson, Lucy, Chloe, Raymond, Francis, Perry, Squire and Silvy; old Chloe, Flanders, Jim, Ben, Morris, Sam and Maria; and except also the following named negro slaves claimed by the said John Pray Hines as his of one Mary Sleigh, deceased, to wit; Tamar and her children Darby Collins, Caroline, Cornelia and Hetty; Paul his wife Charlotte, and their children, Edward Harry and Isaac, old Isaac Toney, Cupid, old Ben and old Sulphur; and also except the following named negro slaves with the issue and increase of the females, claimed by one Maria Hines, widow of the said Lewis Hines, under and by virtue of an alleged marriage settlement between the said Lewis Hines and Ann Maria Hines, formerly Ann Maria [name], and one William J. Way, trustee [image 650] dated on the twenty first day of January in the year [1824] to wit Dick Hannah, Lucy, Peggy, and Peggy’s child Sulphur; Daphne and her children, Charlotte Betsy and Jacob…”
Further, now we can also trace these people back further into history through our knowledge that they were originally owned by one John Pray, who clearly had a relationship with the Hines family, since John Hines had the middle name Pray. It turns out that Lewis Hines was married to a Pray, so this opens up another line for research.
If you’re interested in this particular story, here’s a link to my transcription of the court document: https://theyhadnames.net/2023/08/23/court-case-against-lewis-hines-estate-naming-numerous-enslaved-people-1841/.
These “loose papers” are a genealogical and historical gold mine and well worth your time to browse through them. Once I found in them the complete testimonies of witnesses in an investigation that led to a trial, with all the witnesses’ relationships to each other identified.
What I’ve Been Reading
I’ve been listening to the audiobook of “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism” by James Loewen. Loewen is also the author of “Lies My Teacher Told me.” The existence of sundown towns — where Black people remained after dark at their peril and could not reside — won’t be a surprise to anyone reading this, but I was shocked to learn that the bulk of them were in the Midwest. I knew that Indiana, where I grew up, and Illinois, where the author lived, had deep racist roots but was not aware that there were sundown towns there during my childhood (and after). The book is fascinating and horrifying in itself, but there is also an online database, started by James Loewen and continued by others after his death, and including maps that provide a visual of just how pervasive these towns were: https://justice.tougaloo.edu/sundown-towns/using-the-sundown-towns-database/.
Obviously, the lack of such towns on the map in the South can’t mean they didn’t exist, because we know they did. The book has reminded me of reading about the first integrated prom held in the town where my maternal grandmother grew up: Rochelle, Wilcox County, Georgia. The year? 2013. Let me repeat that. 2013. You can read more about that here: https://www.bet.com/article/b458x0/georgia-school-finally-gets-racially-integrated-prom.