Friday, August 11, 2006

Colonial Free African-American book online

Lee Anders at The Geneaholic blog provided a link to a web page with the 2000 page book about Free African-Americans in the Southeast in colonial times. The web site is www.freeafricanamericans.com.

The description of the book is:

FREE AFRICAN AMERICANS
OF VIRGINIA, NORTH CAROLINA
SOUTH CAROLINA, MARYLAND AND DELAWARE
by Paul Heinegg

The history of the free African American community as told through the family history of most African Americans who were free in the Southeast during the colonial period.

About 2,000 pages of family histories based on all colonial court order and minute books on microfilm at the state archives of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and Delaware (over 1000 volumes), 1790-1810 census records, tax lists, wills, deeds, free Negro registers, marriage bonds, parish registers, Revolutionary War pension files, etc. There are also another 2,000 pages or so of abstracted tax lists, census records, etc., under "Colonial Tax Lists..."

There are links for each resource that is available, and then alphabetical indices for the family genealogy reports in some of the chapters.

This is a tremendous resource for researchers with African-American roots in these states. I quickly checked to see if my wife's Maryland slave-holding ancestors are mentioned - they aren't.

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