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Volume totaling 184 pages. Book is in new condition. Per the publisher;
An 1818 statute of the
Georgia legislature required all free persons of color to register with the
inferior court of their county of residence. According to the statute, county
clerks were required to inscribe each freed man or woman by name, age, place of
birth, residence, year arrived in Georgia, and occupation. While not all clerks
performed their duties to the letter of the law, these source records contain
vital identifying information for African-American Georgians long before the
Civil War or the watershed 1870 U.S. census. The ensuing registers, varying in
their completeness, survive for twenty-one Georgia counties. (Incidentally, the
only way to emancipate a slave in Georgia was by an act of the legislature.
Antebellum manumissions, though rare, were granted for unusual acts, such as
defending an owner’s property during a British incursion during the War of 1812,
extinguishing a fire at the state capital, and other faithful service.)
Volume II in this series by Michael A. Ports contains
transcriptions of the free black registers for the Georgia counties of
Appling,Camden, Clarke, Emanuel, Jones, Pulaski, and Wilkes. Mr. Ports has
arranged the contents of the record books in a series of tables, county by
county and chronologically thereunder. A full-name index at the back of each
volume provides for easy searching. Because the recording styles of the county
clerks differ from one another, or from year to year, the author has provided an
overview of the registers he found in each county, references to any gaps in the
registers, handwriting irregularities or peculiarities, and so on. In addition
to the required information, a few clerks recorded the registrant’s height,
weight, skin color, and name of their guardian. Persons of a historical mindset
will appreciate Mr. Ports’ inclusion in the front matter of the wording of
salient Georgia laws from 1818 to 1835 that mandated the registration of free
Negroes. These are followed by the Georgia manumission statutes enacted after
1798.
Finally, since, in theory, the freedmen and women were required to register
themselves every year after 1818, researchers will be able to track the
whereabouts or disappearance of individuals over time.
Just what you need for genealogy research.