Out of the hundreds of published slave narratives,only a handful exist specific to South Carolina, and most of these are not readily available to modern readers. Edited by Susanna Ashton, I Belong to South Carolina restores to print seven slave narratives documenting the lived realities of slavery as it existed across the Palmetto State’s upcountry, midlands, and lowcountry, from plantation culture to urban servitude. First published between the late eighteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth, these richly detailed firsthand accounts present a representative cross section of slave experiences, from religious awakenings and artisan apprenticeships to sexual exploitations and harrowing escapes. In their distinctive individual voices, narrators celebrate and mourn the lives of fellow slaves, contemplate the meaning of freedom, and share insights into the social patterns and cultural controls exercised during a turbulent period in American history.

Each narrative is preceded by an introduction to place its content and publication history in historical context. The volume also features an afterword surveying other significant slave narratives and related historical documents on South Carolina. I Belong to South Carolina reinserts a chorus of powerful voices of the dispossessed into South Carolina’s public history, reminding us of the cruelties of the past and the need for vigilant guardianship of liberty in the present and future.

Susanna Ashton is an associate professor and associate chair in the Department of English at Clemson University. She is the author of Collaborators in Literary America, 1870–1920 and co-editor of These “Colored” United States: African American Essays from the 1920s.

So, here is the specific request from Paul M. Kankula (webmaster of the Project):

I would like someone to help me identify which of the 11,000+ SC cemeteries should be considered Black. There are many Black Baptist Church Associations that would probably be a big help when it comes to identifying the churches. http://www.palmettoroots.org/Church_SCAfricanAmericanBaptistConventions.html My partner Gary Flynn at ke8fd@bellsouth.net would be the one who should have the info sent to.

He also passed along another neat nugget. He has a site setup giving the English equivalents of foreign given names. I will be adding each of these resources to the statewide resources page. I may dig a bit deeper and add some of these on the county pages where appropriate. Thanks to Paul for passing this along and I hope some of our readers may be able to help them out.

There are some historical images as well… I think the top of the highlights (there are several real gems here….) is probably the voices – digital library section with transcripts of letters http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/black_voices/black_voices.cfm this is a must read…unfortunately it is no longer on their site.

That section is a must bookmark page too…. I’ve quickly become absorbed in some of the “tangents” leading off from that page and could easily spend all night reading there.

These plantations were in the United States (including South Carolina) and in Barbados. From the site…

Working side by side with known descendants of Drayton family freedmen, we have documented the lineages of known descendants, and gathered more than 10,000 pages of archival records, census and other public records, and extracted the names of more than 1,600 enslaved people who lived and worked on Drayton family plantations over time.

They have compiled the known lineages of those that worked on Magnolia Plantation between 1724 and 1790.

This site will be a MUST bookmark for those researching African American Genealogy in South Carolina. It looks like with the information they have to start with it already is a MUST see site.

Of course, one of the challenges of researching African American genealogy has been access to privately held records and it looks like they are essentially opening up many of these privately held records for public use.

She died at 65 and was survived by 10 children….

Her descendants have been traced and seventh generation descendants of Priscilla have been reunited with people from her homeland, Sierra Leone. The exhibit started February 15th and will run through May 11th.

They detail her trip to North America on board the slave ship Hare from Rhode Island, life in slavery and the research of her descendants. Edward Ball discovered the story of Priscilla as he was researching his descent from Elias Ball. His research made the tracing of Priscilla’s descendants possible.

This sounds like a great exhibit to those that are abl to get to the South Carolina State Museum.

From the Burlington, NC Times News about a man that has traced his “literary roots”. Here’s probably the key nugget of the piece…

But it was holding onto one of those pictures that set him on a quest to uncover his roots, which in-clude two of the most illustrious black authors in American history: Langston Hughes and Charles Waddell Chesnutt.

There are a number of good online resources to get started on your African American Family History research. There are of course, many general genealogy sites, but tops among these specialized sites is probably Afrigeneas. For instance, they have a good collated list of African American Census schedules online. Distant cousin also has a good list of African American Resources as well as Cyndi’s list. All of these are good starting places.

One of the other things I hope to do with this site is to start organizing a good listing of South Carolina specific resources for the research of African American Ancestry as well.

Where there is greater challenge there is usually greater reward and this is no exception.