Copied from Va History Roots list. I thought some of you might find this interesting. From: John Kneebone <jkneebon> To: [email protected] Subject: Re: African American Genealogy Message-ID: <[email protected]> Clayton Cramer and others have referred to the research problems posed by the absence of surnames for slaves. In fact, I have concluded that the majority of slaves did have surnames, usually different from those of their masters, and that the masters (and conventions of the slaveholding culture) hid those surnames. The minute books of the First African Baptist Church, Richmond, 1841-1860, contain thousands of names of slaves who were baptised, had their church membership transferred, or required discipline for transgressions. The names of their masters are also given. The vast majority of slave surnames--upwards of 80%--differ from those of the master. Only a tiny fraction of the slaves listed in the church minute books have only a given name. The Library of Virginia is preparing to publish a biography of Henry Box Brown (see the spring 1999 issue of Virginia Cavalcade for his escape from Richmond in a box). Henry Brown was born at the Louisa County plantation of John Barret, and went to William Barret, a son and Richmond tobacco manufacturer, by inheritance. He married a slave woman named Nancy, who appears in the First African Baptist Church minutes as Nancy Brown, identified also as the slave of Mr. Cottrell, a detail confirmed in Brown's 1851 Narrative. Thus, it appears that when slaves married, women could take the surname of their husband and be known by that name. But, if whites did know the full names of their slaves, conventions prevented them from identifying them that way. I have compared the accounts of fugitive slaves from Virginia given in William Still's Underground Railroad with reports and advertisments in the newspapers. More often than not, Still identifies the fugitives with both given names and surnames, while the advertisements placed by the fugitives' masters identify them by given name only. In Charles Dew's excellent book, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge, there is the story of a slave, a master ironworker, whose name in the records over the years goes from just the given name to a a full name, with identity through the surname for his family, too. Dew rightly sees this as evidence of assertion, of a successful claim to personality, and even a political act. On the other hand, the denial of full names in the records and the newspapers seems to me to fit the sociologist Orlando Patterson's explanation of slavery as "social death." Most of all, my earlier assumptions that slaves had no surnames, unless they took that of a master, has been replaced by awareness of a far more complicated situation, both back then and for researchers studying the records today. John -- John T. Kneebone [email protected] Director, Publications and Educational Services Library of Virginia http://leo.vsla.edu Carol P. Martoccia 903 East Fifth Street Greenville, NC 27858 Pridgen Home Page: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Meadows/6297 Pridgen Archives: http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl