LowCountry Africana – Documenting the history of African American Slaves in South Carolina
Sign up for our South Carolina Genealogy newsletter:
There’s a new site that’s dedicated to the genealogy of African Americans of the Lowcountry. The site is sponsored by the Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Charleston, SC and will be publishing records online of the African American slaves of plantations from the traditional rice growing areas of the low country of South Carolina, Georgia and even Northern Florida. (Covering the area of Gullah/Geechee culture.) The site is called LowCountry Africana. They have ambitious goals it appears, their first project will be putting online reconstructed family histories of the slaves of the Drayton family plantations.
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.
Sign up for our South Carolina Genealogy newsletter:
