Offers a guide to census indexes, including federal, state, county, and town records, available in print and online; arranged by year, geographically, and by topic.
In the antebellum South, the presence of free people of color was problematic to the white population. Not only were they possible assistants to enslaved people and potential members of the labor force; their very existence undermined popular justifications for slavery. It is no surprise that, by the end of the Civil War, nine Southern states had enacted legal provisions for the "voluntary" enslavement of free blacks. What is surprising to modern sensibilities and perplexing to scholars is that some individuals did petition to rescind their freedom. Family or Freedom investigates the incentives for free African Americans living in the antebellum South to sacrifice their liberty for a life in bondage. Author Emily West looks at the many factors influencing these dire decisions -- from desperate poverty to the threat of expulsion -- and demonstrates that the desire for family unity was the most important consideration for African Americans who submitted to voluntary enslavement. The first study of its kind to examine the phenomenon throughout the South, this meticulously researched volume offers the most thorough exploration of this complex issue to date.
The Conquest of Labor offers the first biography of Daniel Pratt (1799-1873), a New Hampshire native who became one of the South's most important industrialists. After moving to Alabama in 1833, Pratt started a cotton gin factory near Montgomery that by the eve of the Civil War had become the largest in the world. Pratt became a household name in cotton-growing states, and Prattville-the site of his operations-one of the antebellum South's most celebrated manufacturing towns. Based on a rich cache of personal and business records, Curtis J. Evans's study of Daniel Pratt and his "Yankee" town in the heart of the Deep South challenges the conventional portrayal of the South as a premodern region hostile to industrialization and shows that, contrary to current popular thought, the South was not so markedly different from the North.
Claiborne B. May (ca.1798-1860/1865) moved from South Carolina to St. Clair County, Alabama, and married twice. He later moved to Tallegdega County, then Coosa County, and finally Greene County, Alabama. Descendants and relatives lived in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas and elsewhere.
This ambitious work chronicles 250 years of the Cromartie Family genealogical history. Included in the index of nearly 50,000 names are the current generations, and all of those preceding, which trace ancestry to our family patriarch, William Cromartie who was born in 1731 in Orkney, Scotland and his second wife, Ruhamah Doane who was born in 1745. Arriving in America in 1758, William Cromartie settled and developed a plantation on South River, a tributary of the Cape Fear near Wilmington, North Carolina. On April 2, 1766, William married Ruhamah Doane, a fifth generation descendant of a Mayflower passenger to Plymouth, Stephen Hopkins. If Cromartie is your last name, or that of one of your blood relatives, it is almost certain that you can trace your ancestry to one of the thirteen children of William Cromartie, his first wife, and Ruhamah Doane, who became the founding ancestors of our Cromartie Family in America: William Jr, James, Thankful, Elizabeth, Hannah Ruhamah, Alexander, John, Margaret Nancy, Mary, Catherine, Jean, Peter Patrick, and Ann E. Cromartie. These four volumes hold an account of the descent of each of these first-generation Cromarties in America, including personal antidotes, photographs, copies of family Bibles, wills and other historical documents. Their pages hold a personal record of our ancestors and where you belong in the Cromartie Family Tree.
Conventional wisdom holds that freedmen's education was largely the work of privileged, single white northern women motivated by evangelical beliefs and abolitionism. Backed by pathbreaking research, Ronald E. Butchart's Schooling the Freed People shatters this notion. The most comprehensive quantitative study of the origins of black education in freedom ever undertaken, this definitive book on freedmen's teachers in the South is an outstanding contribution to social history and our understanding of African American education.
The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Vold Forde, Author What questions would you like to ask your grandmothers, great grandmothers or tenth great grandmothers? In this work, the authors of the "grandmother stories"(Dr. Forde and cousins) imaginatively ask their grandmothers questions about the source of their indomitable spirit; and as you read, you will appreciate the choice. The centerpiece of the book consists of interpretative essays featuring our grandmothers in times of trial and times of joy. The essays are accompanied by descriptive chronologies, with the reader appropriately instructed by maps from each period, photographs, sketches, portraits and recipes. An encyclopedic Appendix in CD-ROM form offers further documentation, extensive genealogies, and even more maps, photographs, and archival materials; all of which will eventually be published as Volume II. The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Vold Forde's valiant work of genealogy presented herein is encyclopedic, intelligible and thoroughly entertaining. Lineages of our scattered kindred so lovingly compiled by her, are a "collection for remembrance" inspired by the faithful lives of ten generations of Southern ancestors. Impressive archival research and background materials on the Bankston, Brooks, Cobb, Hamlin, Henderson, Ivey, Jarrett, Lea, McDonald, Miller, Rambo, and Sappingtons of Georgia lines are included. Within the pages of this book, you will find adventure, love, war, peace, depression, and prosperity in the lives of our valiant colonial, pioneer, antebellum and postbellum ancestors. You may correlate traits of these brave and steadfast women with those in your own mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters. If you seek a greater understanding of your Southern ancestry and of yourself, you will surely find it here.