Recall with me the complaint I made back in 2016 about a vital records collection out of Pittsylvania County, Virginia in which the information for enslaved people was improperly indexed.
Ancestry has this collection now and has done a tremendous job of indexing these records so slave owners are no longer inappropriately displayed in parental fields. I discovered this spontaneously while I was documenting and attempting to identify the people my family members enslaved.
Because this vital records collection has been fixed, I can use it for this purpose now. I want to outline the process for anyone else doing who might be doing African American genealogy in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. I'm certainly going to be using it to identify as many enslaved people by name as I possibly can. It's a project I've been envisioning for years. It feels surreal now that it's something I can finally accomplish.
Pittsylvania County, Virginia includes enslaved people in their vital records indexes. Their names, ages, sexes, birth and death locations, owners, cause of death, and informants are all included. Because it's the same index that was used for white folks, there is no difference in detail for the information that is collected, with the exception of parental information. All the records I've seen so far for enslaved persons leave that field blank.
There's a unique opportunity with this kind of detail to cross reference entries in the vital records collections and probate records of white slave owners with the slave schedule on the 1860 US Census. Instead of tick marks and ages, genealogical researchers in this community can potentially fill in the missing names of that slave schedule, reconstructing a more accurate snapshot of these plantations.
Revisiting Aletha Letty Keatts, we can view the potential of such a reconstruction.
According to the slave schedule in 1860, she had four slaves: a 24 year old woman and three children. Cross referencing the information in the vital records collection, we can identify these children as Henrietta, Henry, and William. We also know that all three of these children died in 1860 from "flux," which is dysentery. It's only taken together that these records present a clear image that begins to emerge. It's possible that these were the children of the 24 year old woman. If I can identify her, I won't have just reconstructed all the slaves in a white household. I could potentially piece together a family.
I've been at it for hours, trying to see how many enslaved people I can identify using this method. I've found the names of more enslaved people from Keatts households all over the county and lined them up with entries on the slave schedule. The ages can be off by a bit, but so far I'm finding that there are usually people of the right age and sex to everyone I'm finding in the vital records collection.
If I can find a place where probate records, vital records, and the slave schedule all line up, I may get lucky enough to piece together an entire plantation of enslaved people with names and ages. I thought I was going to get lucky with one of the slave owners in my family who died in 1860, but his will didn't list by name any of the enslaved people he was bequeathing to his children.
Part of the challenge is that John, David, Charles, Mary, and Susan are names that get reused A LOT in this family. When they all own slaves and operate their own plantations, it can be hard to tell them apart. I've successfully identified almost all of the Keatts entries in 1860. I need to check to see if I've already done the same thing with the 1850 slave schedules already.
I've still been working on how to best document slavery in my tree when I find it. I've been making extensive use of the Slave Owner tree tag that Ancestry has, which lets me revisit and reexamine cases I've previously looked at. But the nut I couldn't figure out how to crack was how best to display the information I've found about enslaved people in a way where it's visible and accurate. Where relationships have been confirmed by DNA, using the familial relationships functions would be accurate. Where no such relationship has been confirmed or even hinted at in family lore, I don't like this as a solution. I've seen all kinds of variations for these situation, including one that was recommended by Crista Cowan: adding people incorrectly to the tree as children, removing the relationship, then linking to them in the Links section and labeling them as slaves is one method. While this allows people to create profiles for the enslaved people in their families, that has the potential to confuse the AncestryDNA algorithm because the people are just floating in the tree and not attached in any way that's visible to someone other than the tree's creator.
A new approach I'm trying is using the events under the Facts section, then transcribing in the description the ages and sexes of the enslaved people listed in the slave schedule. Which one to choose gave me pause: Residence, Property (that feels gross), or a custom field I would even call "Slavery" or something similar. I can attach any sources I've used to piece together the information I've found in the vital records collections or probate records. When probates and wills list slaves by name, I can do the same thing in those descriptions as well.
The issue here is the character limit in the description. On small family plantations, this is doable. On a larger plantation, I would quickly run out of space. I'd love the see Ancestry create specific event fields in their trees specific to slavery. Instead of a text field, it could allow for individuals to be listed with dedicated fields to names, ages, and racial designations. If this fields were searchable within the tree, that would be the idea solution. Even better would be the ability to create profiles within the tree for these individuals, then link them to these fields. This would allow for comprehensive research to be contained within the tree, searchable, and displayed correctly. I've never seen any family tree software or service that has figured out a good way to do all of those things. For those in want of a solution to this problem, this is the one I'm currently using.