Last month, I got a telephone call while I happened to be in the office. The voice at the other end had traveled from out of state with an older relative in search of an ancestor's property. In the course of our conversation, I shared that the Library is not the agency for registration of land and that knowing who owned a property 150 years ago is not often instantaneously discoverable. I felt badly that I could not just say drive 4 miles off US Hwy 336 near the Garnett post office and on the right you'll find the farm that Black freedman John Orr had in St. Peter's Parish in 1840. Yes, you've read the date correctly. John Orr was a freed man long before the Emancipation Proclamation and passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865.
His descendant had questions about when and how John Orr had become a freed man and who had freed him as well.
The rest of this post is a summary of what I learned, searched, and concluded as a result of trying to help my off-site customer.
It
is hard to research free blacks in South Carolina because most of the
manumissions were private matters; there has been a significant loss of
records, particularly in Beaufort District; and we do not know the name of John
Orr’s slave master. Oftentimes the key to the freedman's life story begins to unravel through identification of the slave master and records related to that white person's life and legacy.
According
to Rowland, Moore, and Rogers, “One of the unique features of upper St. Peter’s
Parish in the antebellum Beaufort District was the existence of a sizeable
community of free black farmers.” John Orr and his family was one of that sizeable community of free black farmers. Senese counted the numbers of free Blacks in
the State from 1790 to 1860. Rowland et al. included figures for St.
Peter’s Parish. I have merged the data from these two sources into this table
to give you a better idea of just how unique the John Orr family was:
|
Census Year |
# of Freed Blacks in SC |
# of Freed Blacks in St. Peter’s Parish |
Percentage of SC’s Total Population |
|
1790 |
1801 |
Not given |
0.72 |
|
1800 |
3185 |
134 |
0.92 |
|
1810 |
4554 |
83 |
1.10 |
|
1820 |
6826 |
84 |
1.36 |
|
1830 |
7921 |
Not given |
1.36 |
|
1840 |
8276 |
147 |
1.39 |
|
1850 |
8960 |
Not given |
1.34 |
|
1860 |
9914 |
Not given |
No percentage given |
The “Free Persons of Color” entry in the South Carolina Encyclopedia offered some interesting details about the Free Black population from 1670 to 1863 in this state:
· At no time did the Free Black population exceed 2% of the state’s antebellum population.
· There were more freed females than males.
· In 1860, 72% of the freed blacks were of mixed race.
· Only 5% of South Carolina’s 1860 population as a whole were of mixed race.
· In 1860, 3% of the state’s slave population lived in Charleston along with 33% of all the freed blacks in the state.
BRIEF CENSUS SEARCHES I DID TO HELP MY CUSTOMER:
Free
blacks were counted in all the United States Federal Censuses beginning from
1790 up through 1860. I used the Library’s subscription to the Ancestry
Library Edition (ALE) to see if I could discover when the first Orr family
member may have been freed. [You can do the same searches from home - temporarily - with home access to Ancestry Library Edition as long as you have a valid Beaufort County Library card and the password - which you can get from any of the BCL's branch libraries].
·
I found a few white Orr families in Georgetown District’s Prince
Frederick’s Parish in 1790. There is no way to tell from census records whether
or not one of these white Orr family members were the former slave master of John Orr of St. Peter's Parish circa 1845. Further investigation would be required.
· There are some other white Orr families in Pendleton District and Union Districts in 1800 and 1810. There is no way to tell from census records whether or not one of these white Orr family members were the former slavemaster of John Orr of St. Peter's Parish circa 1840.Further investigation would be required.
·
There is a John Orr in St. Luke’s Parish (adjacent to St. Peter’s
Parish) in 1820. The page with the number of “Free Black” persons and slaves is
not on the microfilm that was photographed for ALE so I cannot tell you how
many other black people were in his household. I don't know whether the missing page is a problem with the original 1820 census or a problem with the microfilming of the original 1820 census or a problem with ALE's digitization of the microfilm of the original 1820 census. That would require further investigation.
[Please note: The index gives his name as “John Ore.” Other alternate spellings that I have seen on ALE are: Our and Owe.] I briefly searched the 1790, 1800, 1810 and 1830 US Censuses and found no “Orr” family members. I did not try the alternate spellings.
·
In the 1840 US Census there were 7 households with the surname “Orr” in
St. Peter’s Parish consisting of a total of 40 freed black people.
It's my goal and job to guide customers to resources that will help them answer their own questions. It is not my job to build family trees or do all the research necessary to discover an answer to a particular question about one's family origins. It's like being a bird dog. I am supposed to "flush out" the covey so that the hunter knows where to shoot the gun. Whether or not a bird gets killed and put into the cooking pot, is up to the skill of the hunter.
· When I was having no success in the Ancestry Library Edition database, I moved over into the FamilySearch.org website just in case the indexing was more accurate. Sometimes it is an improvement. This time, it was not.
Tip: Always try “Browsing” the US census for additional family members if you are fairly confident that the family was in a particular area in a particular census year. Automatic indexing of script can be quite faulty. [Think of Facebook taking down an ad for onion seeds.] Sometimes one just has to eyeball each page because handwriting is often hard to transcribe electronically.
HOW A SLAVE BECAME FREE IN SOUTH CAROLINA VARIED THROUGH TIME:
In any genealogical search, context is key. Given the predominant theory of the times, a slave owner could free or manumit his/her chattel property (i.e., enslaved persons) whenever s/he so wanted to do by deed, will, parole or any other way that the slave master desired. That all changed after 1800 because of new laws in South Carolina.
1800 – The slave master must certify that the enslaved person was of good character, can take care of himself/ herself, and submit a deed granting the slave’s freedom to a court.
1820 – The state limited the rights of slave masters to free their enslaved people. Freedom of a slave could only happen by act of the State Legislature. There were challenges in court, particularly in Miller v. Reigne (1835) that led to the decision that “a Negro [who] had been at large and acting as a free man for more than twenty years, a deed of manumission under the act of 1800 was presumed.”
You can see the law on the Hathitrust.org website. It’s in the Reports And Resolutions of South Carolina to the General Assembly [Columbia] series on page 138 of 514 in the digital document. The law was to go into effect in March of 1821 – which definitely means that John Orr was freed before the terms of the new law came into effect - which means that his manumission was a private matter for his slave master and could have been done by any means that his unknown owner chose.
· From my research, it appears that the first free black Orr was freed sometime between 1810 (as his name is not listed in the 1810 Census) and 1820 (when he is listed) so the legal instruments for his freedom were likely filed in a courthouse somewhere. There is nothing to indicate where he may have been freed or by whom or how he may have ended up in Beaufort District in the census records.
· If John Orr or his slave master/slave mistress filed documents in the Beaufort District courthouse in or before January 1865 (more or less any legal paperwork filed from 1711 through 1864) such documents are likely lost forever. Much of the courthouse documents for Beaufort District, documents such as manumissions, wills and estate records and deeds and land records, did not survive the Civil War.
SOUTH CAROLINA DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY (SCDAH) RECORDS ONLINE INDEX:
I
plugged the surname “Orr” into the South Carolina Department of Archives and
History Online Records Index and got 308 hits. When I
altered the search to “Orr, J” I got 115 hits. When I narrowed the search even
further to “Orr, J” and place: “Beaufort District” I got 3 hits. It seems that
John Orr was assessed $2.00 in 1824 for being a free black person.
NEXT STEPS FOR ANYONE WITH FREE BLACK ANCESTORS IN SOUTH CAROLINA:
· Listen: Dr. Nic Butler, the Public Historian of the Charleston County Public Library, has an enlightening podcast called the Charleston Time Machine. Episode 146 of that series explains how a slave might become freed before the Civil War era.
· Learn: The International African-American Museum’s Center for Family History has a wonderful blog that discusses research done on other Freed black people, mostly in Charleston County. Scroll down to “Records for Free People of Color in the United States from Colonial Time to Emancipation.” You could pick up clues on how to proceed.
· Explore: You can search the SCDAH’s Online Records Index to see if any records relating to your free Black ancestors are there. Just be aware that the search engine is not particularly easy to use nor that it indexes every document in the SCDAH.
· Contact: The South Carolina Department of Archives and History for guidance about state records that might help you answer your questions about who freed your ancestor. The Miscellaneous Records at SCDAH were mentioned several times in the sources I reviewed for you. The staff at SCDAH are the best people to ask about what those records contain and how to research them.
· Contact: Your local public library might have a person on staff who specializes in helping family historians learn how to track down their ancestor and/or provide classes on how to do genealogy and/or provide you with books or other materials on how to do family history research. I strongly recommend that you ask for a basic guide on how to undertake African American genealogy there.
· Understand: Family history research is a marathon, not a sprint. Mapping out your path by learning about records and how to do the research now can save you a lot of frustration and time later.
Tip: It’s always a very good idea to contact agencies well in advance of
a visit to the area as family history research never proceeds in the exact same
way for every person who is on your family tree.
SOURCES:
Among the sources I consulted to help my customer and prepare this blog post were:
The History of Beaufort County South Carolina, volume 1, 1514 – 1861 by Lawrence S. Rowland, Alexander Moore and George C. Rogers, Jr. (Columbia, SC : University of South Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 305-306.
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