Antigua and Barbuda-Slave Records, 1742-1863
An Indexer in my Stake called me about the Antigua and Barbuda—Slave Returns, 1742–1863. She had a concern about the instructions telling her that the Proprietor was listed on the rightmost column and the Increase and Decrease leftmost column. But the names in the leftmost columns were mostly the same name as the slave. I thought she should use the rightmost column as the Proprietors name and input the names in the Increase & Decrease columns as Enslaved Person. What do you think?
Batch M3V5-2T3 or M3V5-VB4
Answers
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Hi Janet Lynne. There are several of us indexing and reviewing these records. I reported the problems with the increase/decrease column example (#4) on February 8th. (Joe Dawson is not a proprietor, he is listed in the slave column, as are John Burley and Dean who were all returned John Stewart. John Stewart and Dr Gillan are the proprietors.) So far, nothing has been done to correct the errors on the example. There are other problems with this project, including indexing every unique name as either a proprietor or an enslaved person. There are other people besides these two groups, like attorneys, property managers, justices of the peace, etc. (Also reported.)
We should be indexing all the names in the increase and decrease columns as what they are known to be from the language in the document. So, Three by purchase "William" from Eliza Reeves (William is indexed as enslaved, and Eliza Reeves as a Proprietor) for example. There is some disagreement as to whether we have to index the increases when they appear on the same image. The babies, like Sam Joseph and Lucy Ann, and people like William are often on the same image as shown in the first batch. Sometimes they are not on the image when there are many pages of slaves. So of course, they would have to be indexed as unique names.
The decreased column is really important since this is where we see the names of the deceased and also those who have been sold to other proprietors or manumitted. In addition, in the Oaths there are occasionally more names of slaves who are missing, or have been manumitted. Also, make sure to tell the reviewer that in the Oath, they expand Richd to Richard (Entry 23) so they should index the most complete name.
Hope that helps. Hope the instructions and example gets corrected too!
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