If you’ve checked out TheyHadNames.net recently, you might have noticed that it’s sporting a fresh new look! This is the first major revamp since the site transitioned from a simple WordPress blog to a full-fledged website. Over the past seven years, I’ve been adding content bit by bit, and it was definitely time for a complete reorganization and redesign. Everything that was on the site is still here. The search bar remains at the top

In 1882, Captain Andrew Stacy of the all-Black Georgia Lincoln Guards in Liberty County, Georgia, asked the Liberty County Ordinary, Joseph Ashmore, to record the names of the Guards. Ashmore recorded the list in the middle of an apparently unrelated Court of Ordinary Book that was dedicated to Homestead Exemptions. No other reference to this unit has been found so far. I discovered this in 2025 while paging through that book to record the homestead

Did you know there were Irish slaveholders and overseers in the United States? We tend to think of them as having been mostly of English extraction. In Ireland, the idea is apparently quite controversial, as the Irish tend to think of themselves as having been the oppressed, not the oppressors. Martine Brennan, an Irish public historian, has pulled back the veil on this part of Ireland’s history in her website Enslavement to Citizenship, where she

Ever have an item on your “to-do” list that stays there for years because you know it will open up a time-consuming can of worms? I got to cross one of those off recently. Not because I did it. Because it turns out it didn’t need doing. Several years ago I ran across an article in the Liberty County Coastal Courier that claimed the existence of antebellum Liberty County tax records that contained the names

The Liberty County Martin Luther King Jr Observance Association put on a wonderful series of events in January. During their awards ceremony, Flanders Pray, a freedman who was one of Liberty County’s first African American teachers after the Civil War and an inspirational community leader, was given the Lifetime Achievement Award. A large group of his descendants accepted the award on his behalf, and to my complete surprise, the family called me up to the

Rebecca Fripp Green West was born in St. Helena Township, Beaufort County, South Carolina, around 1874, and lived most of her life there except during one of her marriages. Her parents were Quash and Mollie Fripp, formerly enslaved people of South Carolina. Quash Fripp was a private in the 33d U.S. Colored Troop during the Civil War. Not all of Quash and Mollie Fripp’s children were enumerated in census records, and neither were all of