Many Black Americans still labor under an enduring myth, not of their own making, that the lives and lived experiences of their distant ancestors are unknowable, lost to the grinding void of transatlantic enslavement. It's a myth underpinned by white history-making, in a land that mandated a decennial census but deliberately chose not to name the enslaved until after the Civil War.
And yet, glimmers of these Antebellum histories do exist. Just not in the census.
They're in the property records.
"As a Southerner myself—loving the South, loving our history, for the good and the bad of it—it's the place where our history is probably most under threat," Dr. Elizabeth West said over Zoom, on a frigid January morning in which an ice storm had shuttered Georgia State's campus.
As the Academic Director for the Center for Studies on Africa & Its Diaspora at Georgia State University, Dr. West is no stranger to weaving back together the shattered, disparate strands of Black history. But it was a deep-dive into her own ancestor—the subject of her 2022 book, Finding Francis: One Family's Journey from Slavery to Freedom—that set the stage for the public debut of a database built upon the foundation that Francis' legacy had laid in April of last year
"Data Mining and Mapping Antebellum Georgia" (DMMAG) has compiled a searchable database of the thousands of wills, probate records, and legal documents of Harris County, Georgia. Amid thousands of pages of handwritten, baroque legal jargon about guardianship and executors, these records include the precious data not included in pre-1870 censuses (or their associated "Slave Schedules," which catalogued an enslaver's "property," but exclusively by age and gender).
In a capitalist world where economic transactions have been valued über alles, these legal documents, carefully crafted to safeguard hoarded wealth, contain not only an immense amount of detail but the social architecture to ensure their careful preservation even two centuries later. And Harris County is only the test case, the first of over 100 Georgian counties on the docket for building a similar Black archive.
Here, the archive proves that, despite every attempt to erase the identities of the enslaved, they still had their names.
"Grandma didn't tell us a lot. When grandma moved in with us, she was in her nineties," recalled Rhonda, my partner's mother, from the family home near 95th and Kedzie, its halls still chockablock with the family photos that so captivated Sharita as a child. "But she'd have told us, if we asked."