author's opinion tha
t a comprehensive progr
am of extracting, organizing, and indexing all legal recor
ds from the sla
very period for e
ach Georgia
county (and, eventually, for the entire United States) is long overdue. The old court records of most Georgia counties have not even been thoroughly inventoried. I encourage historical societies to consider such projects in cooperation with the official custodians of their county records.
A note on extracting and indexing genealogical data on slaves. Genealogists researching free persons recognize that, without the combination of first, middle and last names by which free persons were legally known in different legal records, tracing free ancestors would be virtually impossible. Imagine how useless an index or extracted record would be if it only contained first names! Full names allow us to somewhat confidently connect persons from one record with the same persons in another record. Slaves in legal records also have more than first names. A slave's legal identity was the combination of his/her first name and the full name of his/her owner. This combination of slave's first name and owner's full name can be as effective as the name of any free person in tracing slaves from record to record. It is essential whenever extracting slave data about slaves that their owners' full names, as given in the record, also be extracted. When indexing any record which includes slaves, always index slaves by owners' full name (in the usual manner of last, first, middle) followed by the slaves' names, for example:
(Holloway, Martha J.) Martin
One of the greatest challenges in tracing slave ancestors is to trace individual slaves back through former owners, because (working from more recent records to older records) the identifying "tag" of the owners' names usually changes without a clue. A slave typically appears in the records of an owner's legal affairs with no indication of where he or she came from. This is similar to the dilemma faced by researchers of free persons in trying to trace a married woman's ancestry when marriage (or other) records do not exist to show her maiden name. Just as marriage records are indispensable in tracing free persons, records of sale or transfer (as in estate sales, distributions of estates, and bills of sale) are essential to trace individual slaves from owner to owner. In many cases, a particular enslaved person with multiple owners, or even several generations of slaves, could be traced from our oldest records forward, if all existing records were thoroughly extracted and indexed
To make the best use of court records, we must understand the organization and functions of Georgia's courts. The following brief descriptions of each court may help make sense of the wide variety of legal records generated during the period of slavery.
Note: The author is most familiar with records post-dating the State Constitution of 1798. His descriptions of courts and legal records may not accurately reflect courts and practices from the colonial period through 1798.
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