The African American Researcher’s Guide to Online Genealogical Sources

DIGITAL LIBRARY ON AMERICAN SLAVERY University of North Carolina-Greensboro The Digital Library on American Slavery contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, associated with the slave trade. The data comes from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions. The rest of the records come from a wide range of related documents like wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings and amended petitions. Buried here are the names of 80,000 slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites. The Library allows users to search for petitions in fifteen slaveholding states including the District of Columbia. Created with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, its partners include the Race and Slavery Petition Project and the University of North Carolina – Greensboro. The University of North Carolina – Greensboro is the partner that serves as administrator of the online portion of the project. Search for slavery era documents from the comfort of your home using search fields: You can search by:  Name  Date  Keyword  Geographic Data For more information on the records of the Digital Library on American Slavery go to library.uncg.edu/slavery/ PATRIOT’S OF COLOR DATABASE The Patriots of Color project was established to identify persons of color who served the Continental cause in the American Revolution. The project’s beginnings are rooted in the discovery of Professor Gates’ fourth great grandfather who served for four years in the 1st Virginia Regiment of Light Dragoons and received a pension for his service. The project's goal to verify service and complexion of Patriots from each of the thirteen colonies using original records such as pension and bounty land application files, muster and pay rolls, lists of troops, court records, legislative records, etc. These documents often reveal fascinating details about the service of these soldiers as well as life for them before and after the war. At project end, data will be published in hard copy and as an online database. Funding for this project has been provided by Richard Gilder and the Gilder Lehrman Foundation, David Roux, Joseph Dooley and the SAR, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, and the Inkwell Foundation. For more information on the Patriot’s of Color Database go to http://www.archives.com/Patriots BOOK OF NEGROES Nova Scotia The Book of Negroes is a hand-written list of Black passengers leaving New York on British ships in 1783. It gives a name, age, physical description, and status (slave or free) for each passenger, and often an owner's name and place of residence. Compiled by British and American inspectors, researchers can read through Black Loyalist surnames recovered by the researchers during their 1998-'99 research project. Muster roll names have an asterisk * after the name. (The muster rolls were lists of people given provisions by the government.) In some cases, but not in all, Black Loyalists used an owner's surname. All names appear alphabetically, written exactly as they appear in the Book of Negroes and the muster rolls. Three copies of the Book of Negroes exist: one in England, at the Public Records Office in Kew; one in the United States at the National Archives in Washington, DC; and one in Canada, at the Nova Scotia Archives in Halifax. All research of the Black Loyalists begins with this list! They are all the surnames recorded in the Book of Negroes in 1783, with some additions from the 1784 Nova Scotia muster rolls. For more information or to visit the Book of Negroes Website go to http://museum.gov.ns.ca/blackloyalists/names/default.htm