Have you ever wondered how formerly enslaved people could afford to buy land not very long after Emancipation? A contract in Liberty County, Georgia, shows one option. In 1870, ten freedmen — Stephen Stewart, Pulaski Baker, Thomas Bacon, Plenty Alexander, Mingo Norman, Robert Graham, William Wilson, Henry Baker, Shedrick Bacon, and Stephen Daniels — contracted with Theodore N. Winn to buy his 300-acre Laurel Hill plantation for $1500 worth of labor. The contract stipulated that

In the summer of 1870, Charles R. Holcombe conducted an entirely fraudulent U.S. federal census enumeration for Liberty County, Georgia. Not only were there glaring mistakes in the information for real people, Holcombe made up many of the entries, often using names that were common in the Northeast, where he was from. For example, my great-uncle, J. Sloeman Ashmore, was in Holcombe’s census, but the names of his wife and chiildren were completely wrong. Ashmore’s

It’s 2024 already! I took a break over the holidays to work on other things but I’m back at it now. Documenting Post-War Land Records I am still working on documenting land sales involving African Americans in Liberty County following the Civil War. In the mid-1880s, most land deed and lien records in Liberty County Superior Court involved local African American farmers. The lien records were transactions in which farmers mortgaged most of what they

During 1884-1886, there were 90+ land sales in Liberty County involving African Americans as buyers, sellers or neighbors. These sales can tell you where your ancestor lived and when. The descriptions of the land are quite detailed, but normally are in terms of who the neighbors were so figuring out where they were is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Here is an example both of a typical description and one of the reasons why

Where was your ancestor in 1885? I’ve picked up a new project lately. In the mid-1880s, Liberty County farmers, almost all of them Black, often made their annual purchases from Robert Q. Cassels store at McIntosh Station in the spring by mortgaging most everything they owned. The loans, all carrying 8 per cent annual interest, were to be paid off in the fall after the crop of rice, cotton and corn were harvested. Cassels filed

In November 1868, Republican Ulysses S. Grant defeated Democrat Horatio Seymour for the U.S. Presidency on the national stage, but Seymour prevailed in the Georgia vote by a wide margin. It was the first presidential election since the Civil War, and the first in which African Americans could vote in the South. Georgia had just been readmitted to the Union with the proviso that it had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. It did, but the

I’ve been busy with other things these past couple of weeks so have found myself working on things that don’t require much thought, like scanning through the “Southeast Coastwise Inward and Outward Slave Manifests., 1790-1860.” This is a record set on Ancestry that provides documentation of enslaved people being shipped along mainly the U.S. East Coast. The record set is particularly informative after 1808, when the Act of 1807 banning the international slave trade required

Progress on Projects I’m almost done documenting the slaveowners listed in the 1830 Liberty County census. By documenting, I mean adding their names to the overall list of Liberty County slaveowners and building a family tree to try to determine the essential facts of life for slaveowners: birth, death, marriage, names of family who could have gifted them enslaved people or received such gifts, etc. I’ve worked on the 1840, 1850, and 1860 censuses now;