Imagine being easily able to find every single name of an enslaved person listed in Liberty County, Georgia, estate inventories from colonial times through Emancipation. No reading through thousands of pages of old, handwritten documents looking for a first name that might appear in many records.
Downloadable PDFs containing abstracts of all the Liberty County estate inventories that name enslaved people have been available on They Had Names for a while but they didn’t previously have indexes of all the enslaved people named. Why? Because each name had to be manually marked, and there are thousands of names. Weeks of work.
Artificial intelligence came to the rescue. It took two days to work out the right prompt…but then Anthropic’s Claude created an index of those thousands of names across four PDFs totalling 1500+ pages in about 10 minutes.
The updated PDFs are available for download on the They Had Names website for the following time periods:
1762-1777
1775-1823
1824-1849
1850-1865
As always, these are free downloads.
Also available is a download of all the Bryan County Superior Court deed records naming enslaved people from 1795-1865.
