Indexing births in Virginia - Slaves and Slave Owner
When indexing births in Virginia 1854 there are no parent names listed. Are the slave owner names (generally male but sometimes female) recorded as father's name or do I just mark father and mother names as <blank>?
Answers
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The instructions say that if an owner is indicated and there is no father's name, the father's name is left blank (along with all father information). The owner is indicated toward one of the last columns.
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We have discovered that part of the Virginia Slave Birth Index, 1853-1866, contains birth records long after the Civil War (i.e.1866- ca.1879). Not only are the children listed not slaves, but the columns from the original Birth Index seem to have been mixed up: If you compare the FS Index with the WPA source, the "child" in the FS Index is often the "informant" in the source. The "father" or "owner" is really the "child." This part of the index contains births of white children as well as "colored." This part of the Slave Birth Index needs to be drastically overhauled or deleted. We tried to extract records from the Index for Prince William County. Of the roughly 700 births we found, about 280 of them were found to be of free persons, after 1866, with the data columns garbled. // Don Wilson, Ruth E. Lloyd Information Center (RELIC).
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It probably would be most helpful to provide a link to an image so the moderators could direct this to the proper group. It isn't a problem or question about a current project.
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