Group items tagged

Previous posts in this column demonstrated the use of family clusters and neighborhood clusters to identify families in the U. S. federal census. In this post, we will use these same techniques to identify the last owners of a family freed after the abolition of slavery.

When the 1860 federal census was collected and enumerated, slavery was still legal within most of the states south of the Mason-Dixon line. The 1860 federal census enumerated only free people of color in its population schedule; slaves were enumerated namelessly on a separate schedule, identified only by slave owner, age, gender, and color.