Search engines and slavery

Historian Adam H. Domby (College of Charleston) reports that Ancestry has recently changed its search engine in ways that make it more difficult to learn about slavery from basic genealogical inquiries. "When searching for an individual’s name, Ancestry.com stopped including results from the 1850 or 1860 United States Census Slave Schedules." Some improvements have been made but reportedly the search function is still not back to what it was. Read much more here. His article appears in "Black Perspectives," the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS).  

"Who Freed the Slaves?"

A nice New Year's Day pick-me-up from historian Aaron Astor of Maryville College in east Tennessee. He asks his students, "Who freed the slaves?"




Aaron Astor, "Teaching Emancipation," The Historical Society, posted 1 January 2013 (http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2013/01/teaching-emancipation.html : accessed 1 January 2013).

Linkfest with historians, vampire hunters, and more

Links and unlinkable items of interest from the history side:

W. Scott Poole teaches history at the College of Charleston and explains (seriously!) "Why Historians Should Be Vampire Hunters." "These tales of terror illuminate rather than obscure important truths. Slavery did represent a kind of dark magic in which legal fictions transmogrified the bodies of human beings into property."

Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore's take on Ancestry.com: "Facebook for the dead."

Five excellent commandments for those researching in archives from Philip White at The Historical Society. Most applicable to us genealogists: "Process Your Materials ASAP."

Eric Jay Dolin's Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America has a good publisher, has had some good reviews (mostly five stars on Amazon), and has won some prizes. Writing in the June Indiana Magazine of History (recent issues not on line), David J. Silverman of George Washington University says that Dolin tells a good story but misses a lot, because the book's perspective and information are about a century out of date -- among other things, it neglects the Indian side of the story. I hope to read it and make up my own mind, but in the meantime the "Caution" light is up. If Silverman is right, Dolin would be making a mistake similar to the one genealogists make when they trust the "mug books" version of local history.

W. Scott Poole, "Why Historians Should Be Vampire Hunters," The Huffington Post: Culture, posted 20 June 2012 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/w-scott-poole/abraham-lincoln-vampire-hunter_b_1609691.html : accessed 22 June 2012).

Jill Lepore, "Books: Obama, the Prequel," The New Yorker, 25 June 2012, p. 72.

Philip White, "Lessons from the Archives," The Historical Society, posted 18 June 2012 (http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2012/06/lessons-from-archives.html : accessed 22 June 2012).


Eric Jay Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010). 


David J. Silverman, [Review of Dolin], Indiana Magazine of History, vol. 108, no. 2 (June 2012): 192.


Harold Henderson, "8 suggestions for genealogy writers," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 23 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Bookends Friday: The Genealogist and "Empire of Liberty"

I really should just pony up for a subscription to The Genealogist, possibly the most obscure of the top-echelon genealogy magazines. The other day I came across a free library duplicate of the Spring 2003 issue containing an excellent and lengthy article by Cameron Allen, "Lucinda Depp and Her Descendants: A Freed Black Family of Virginia and Ohio," a companion to an earlier article tracing the white Depp family from Powhatan County, Virginia, to central Ohio.

The black Depps were freed under an 1801 deed of emancipation (effective on the death of the grantor and wife), and John Depp's 1829 will, probated in 1831. Allen writes:

The most startling fact in the settlement of Depp's estate was the extreme expedition with which it was accomplished on the heels of the death of his widow, Elizabeth. Her will, made on 7 January 1835, was proved on 2 February 1835 in Powhatan County. In just two weeks from the probate of her will, all the land left to the freed slave family was sold and all the slaves not freed by the will of John Depp were sold on 16 and 17 February 1835. That has to be a record! ... Quite obviously the four projected grantees under the will had decided [ahead of time] ... that they would not take title, but, rather, sell their interest through the executor of the will and take the cash to start a new life elsewhere.

About the time I read this I had just finished Gordon S. Wood's magisterial (and to me very informative) Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. One of his major themes is how the high-minded cosmopolitan visions of the Founders generation morphed into the bumptious, militantly provincial, and rather raw democratic enthusiasm of the next generation. (Just compare the characters of George Washington and Andrew Jackson.)

A tragic part of that story is that in the 1790s there were some good reasons to think that slavery was on the way out, in part because it grossly contradicted the ideals of liberty that had animated the American Revolution. Virginia slaveholders were less willing to break up families; Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and other southerners deplored the institution's injustice; new evangelical Baptist and Methodist denominations stood against slavery; the College of William and Mary conferred an honorary degree on the British abolitionist Granville Sharp.

It was a false dawn. A combination of technological changes, fear that the black revolution in Haiti might spread, and a few actual slave conspiracies turned things ugly. The evangelicals backed off; in 1806 a new Virginia law required freed slaves to leave the state; and the ideology of racism was reborn to justify the repression.

In this context it comes as no surprise that the white Depps' estate was probated in record time and that the black Depps had already planned to leave their home for free soil. Virginia's loss was Ohio's gain. History can illuminate genealogy.

New stuff at the Indiana Historical Society

The March/April IHS print newsletter INPerspective lists new collections and books on hand as of October-November, including

This Place We Call Home: A History of Clark County, Indiana (2007). "This book stands out among similar county histories."

"Slavery Cases in the Indiana Supreme Court" (2007). This pamphlet is also on sale at the state Supreme Court bookstore's website, which says that it "examines several cases presented to the Court between 1816 and 1863 and how, through them, the Court worked to uphold the constitution’s prohibition on slavery in the face of considerable public opposition."

Illinois Central Railroad Collection, from roughly 1870s-1960s with items from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio operations.

KKK Indiana Membership Ledger for various towns, surnames S-Z.

If you aim to drop in sometime, bear in mind that (like some other repositories) they keep Tuesday-Saturday hours. Don't try the door on Monday!