Slavery and emancipation resources in Illinois

Dave Bakke, a columnist for the State Journal-Register newspaper in Springfield, Illinois (home of this September's FGS meeting), has called attention to the state archives' database of servitude and emancipation records (1722-1863). The database (not new) includes information from a variety of sources in nine southern Illinois counties on 1301 men and 929 women, and instructions on how to obtain the original records there indexed.

The same column brings news that University of Iowa law professor Lea VanderVelde is working on a book about slaves in the Land of Lincoln, and in the process helping upgrade the database. She'd like to see it include, for instance, material documenting the role of African-Americans in the lead mining district that includes Jo Daviess County in the state's far northwestern corner.

In her background reading, it sounds like VanderVelde is learning what genealogists should already know: that the late-19th and early-20th-century county histories are far from inclusive. "Many of the frontier histories have been whitewashed, creating an ‘amnesia’ about the slaves and indentured servants in free states.” While culling them for clues and additional sources, we would be ill advised to rely on them for information on anyone who wasn't prominent or conventional, or on the outline of the history they tell.

Methodology Monday with slave ancestors

This month Transitional Genealogists discussed online Curtis G. Brasfield's "Tracing Slave Ancestors: Batchelor, Bradley, Branch, and Wright of Desha County, Arkansas" (National Genealogical Society Quarterly 92 [March 2004]: 6-30). As the author writes in the introduction, this family reconstruction involved three techniques "for solving any difficult genealogical problem:

"Broadening the research to include community and kinship groups, rather than focusing on the parentage of a specific individual

"Recognizing the indirect evidence that records provide, rather than seeking only those records that specify relationships directly

"Combining information from multiple records to reveal evidence not found in any single record, rather than analyzing each record separately from the others."

The article steps through oral history, original post-emancipation records (vitals, 1870 and 1880 censuses, land and probate records, Freedmen's Bureau records), identifying the slave owner (slave census schedules, tax records, estate records, and deeds), finishing with my favorite, "interweaving the evidence," where he pulls together the evidence identifying 22 individuals in two families, name by name. This article is a tour de force of interest to anyone with a tough problem, whether it involves slave research or not.

Methodology Monday with Coin-Coin

The APG Great Lakes chapter's article discussion this month was Elizabeth Shown Mills's "Documenting a Slave's Birth, Parentage, and Origins (Marie Therese Coincoin, 1742-1816): A Test of 'Oral History'" from the December 2008 National Genealogical Society Quarterly (96:245-66).

The article operates on two levels, just as the double title suggests. On one level it's a vivid reminder that "tradition" and "local lore" have an amazing amount of junk encrusted around a possible inner pearl of truth. On another level, it's a demonstration of how to prove ancestry in circumstances when many genealogists would despair. If you like indirect evidence and conflicting evidence, you'll love this article. It definitely repays rereading. Mills also lectured from the same material at FGS Little Rock earlier this fall, so there's a companion CD from Jamb Tapes, Inc., in St. Louis.