Actually, many ex-slaves _did_ take their former owners' surnames. Sometimes, if they did not know what surname to take, the (white) people recording their information just assigned them their former owners' names. And sometimes a female ex-slave would take a different surname from that of her husband, even though they were legally married. Look at the census records for the area and see how many surnames were shared by both black and white families in the same area. In the 1880 census of Williamsburg County, I ran across a man who had both his white family and his mixed family all living under the same roof. The mother of the mulatto children were listed at the man's concubine. Judith Reesor Hutchinson