When Ancestry.com embarked on a massive project to collect nearly 40,000 newspaper articles tracing the lives of 183,000 enslaved people in the United States, the date Aug. 22, 1862, could have crystallized what they were aiming for.
On Page 3 of a long-defunct newspaper called The Southern Confederacy were two advertisements stacked on each other, inconspicuous in their placement between ads for dry goods, land sales and information about a school for girls.
“Look Out For The Negro,” read the top ad placed by a man named John Rice, who was offering a $20 reward for a man named Gus.
The ad described Gus as being “five feet, eight inches high, weights one hundred and fifty pounds; leans his head slightly to one side and down, as if his neck were stiff; has recently had a bone felon (cq) on one forefinger; can’t talk plain speaks in mixture of negro brogue and Spanish. If caught … put him in jail, or send him to me by express.”
Directly beneath was an ad that was even more sinister.
The ad methodically listed the name, age and occupation of each of the enslaved.
Winter was an 83-year-old blacksmith. Robin was a 40-year-old coach driver. His mate — a cook, washer and ironer — was listed just as “His Wife,” while his 4-year-old son was listed as just “Boy.”
Credit: newspapers.com
Credit: newspapers.com
“The above Negroes are offered at private sale, and if not disposed of within ten days, they will be sold on the first Tuesday of September before the Court House door in Atlanta, Georgia at auction,” wrote Solomon Cohen, a notorious slavebroker wrote in his ad. “The above negroes are warranted sound healthy, and good titles.”
As painful as it might be to read advertisements like that, genealogist Nicka Sewell-Smith, a senior story producer for Ancestry, said they serve as a necessary and meaningful tool for African Americans coming to terms with who they are and where they came from.
Calling it “Articles of Enslavement,” Ancestry published a massive, searchable database of 38,000 newspaper articles containing the names, ages, physical descriptions and locations of more than 183,000 enslaved people in America between 1788 and 1867.
As most of the pieces are from slave auctions and runaway slave announcements, the database shows how enslaved people were bought and sold or how some tried to escape.
The collection is free for anyone to access online and becomes part of the 18 million digitized records from the Freedmen’s Bureau and the United States Census related to formerly enslaved or newly emancipated individuals.
“The magnitude of identifying 183,000 formerly enslaved people — within the collection that can help millions of descendants discover family histories and details like names, descriptions and locations for their long sought-after ancestors — is incredibly significant,” Sewell-Smith said.
Credit: Ancestry.com
Credit: Ancestry.com
In many cases, the newspaper articles offer never-before-seen accounts of enslaved men and women in communities where courthouse and community records are not readily available.
“By piecing together individual stories, researchers can construct a more detailed picture of the lived experiences of Black Americans, enriching our collective understanding of history,” said Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, a professor of Africana studies at Morehouse College who worked on the Ancestry project.
Georgia has the largest collection of records, followed by Virginia, Mississippi and Louisiana, all of which were large slaveholding states.
More than 22,000 formerly enslaved people are found in records from Columbus. About 100 of the notices were placed in newspapers in Fulton County.
Sewell-Smith said Ancestry was careful in keeping the articles in their place on the page to point out how common and matter-of-fact they were.
Credit: Jillian McCoy
Credit: Jillian McCoy
“We left them in an original context because it’s important when you start going through the newspaper, and especially looking at things like auctions and runaway slave ads, to see them in the exact format that they were in,” she said.
“Every time I go in this, I find something completely different.”
Most striking about the collection is the detail. Generally, census data offers only a name and a rough age for family researchers. But because of the nature of the articles — describing auctions, sales and runaways — physical details were common.
“Especially with the runaway ads, you see how individuals took it upon themselves to get free,” Sims-Alvarado said. “It offers a physical description and sometimes a glimpse of the person and their personality. It is an enormous amount of context in a small space, and you may even see a glimpse of yourself.”
In August and September of 1862, a man named R.T. Henderson placed at least five advertisements in The Southern Confederacy, looking for “Sam” and “John,” who ran away on July 20.
John was described as “very stout built, yellow complexion, about five feet ten inches in height, thirty years of age.”
Sam was also “rather stout,” but with a “black complexion, about five feet eight inches in height, thirty five years old.”
Henderson was offering a $50 reward.
Credit: Jillian McCoy
Credit: Jillian McCoy
Sewell-Smith said that while the first iteration of the project is exploring sales and runaways, Ancestry is working on expanding the project in the coming months to add more articles.
“Any way that we can help people by providing an additional resource to find their enslaved ancestors is a win,” Sewell-Smith said. “There’s no shortage of stories.”
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