This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/an/3Y.2ADI/1448 Message Board Post: Hi Kim, My 2nd ggrandmother, Susannah Stokely [bef. 1755-27 Aug 1836], and her two husbands, John DeCamp [c. 1750-c. April 1778] and Nehemiah Stokely [1753?-Dec1792], registered slaves in a census taken Nov. 10, 1780 as a result of "An Act for the gradual abolition of slavery," passed 1 March 1780, in PA. By this time, John DeCamp was dead, and Susannah had married Nehemiah. The slaves enumerated were: Male, 35, Syres; female, 40, Nan; female, 14, Melsey; male, 6 Prince; female, 4 Nance; famale 1 and 11 months, Pegg; female, 10 months, Frank. (From Albert's History of Westmoreland County, p. 447) Susannah still had a few slaves in 1806, when an itinerant preacher baptized one of them. There is also a black, "Freeman Stokely," in an early (1800 or 1810, I think) census in N. Huntington Twp., Westmoreland Co., PA, where Susannah and her husbands lived. (That area of Westmoreland Co., now called Waltz' Mills, PA, was originally Susannah's property; after 1835, it was in the newly erected Sewickley Twp.) Polly Finley, Susannah's daughter, had married into a literate family of Presbyterians with a history of teaching their slaves to read. Rev. James Bradley Finley's father, a 1st cousin of Polly's husband, John Finley, freed his literate slaves in Kentucky in 1795, giving them the option of joining the family in their move to Chillicothe, Ohio, or of remaining in Kentucky. About a dozen of them followed the family into Ohio, with only one or two remaining in Kentucky. (This is from James B. Finley's autobiography, published in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1853. You might be interested in his account of life in Kentucky, on the frontier.) I tried to find the census record for Freeman, but was unable to pull it up on the internet. I have a paper copy somewhere. Pat