Overview

In this second edition Mr. Heinegg has assembled genealogical evidence on more than 400 Maryland and Delaware Black families (naming nearly 10,000 individuals), with copious documentation from the federal censuses of 1790-1810 and colonial sources at the Maryland Hall of Records, county archives, and other repositories. The author offers documentation proving that most of these free Black families descended from mixed-race children who were themselves the progeny of white women and African American slaves or free Blacks. This second edition sheds light on the impact of colonial Maryland laws upon free Blacks. Statutes relating to marriages between offspring of African American and white partners carried severe penalties. Mr. Heinegg shows that, nevertheless, several hundred child-bearing relationships in Delaware and Maryland took place over the colonial period, as evidenced directly from the public record. Maryland families, in particular, which comprise the majority of those studied, also had closer relationships with the surrounding slave population than did their counterparts in Delaware, Virginia, or the Carolinas. Mr. Heinegg recounts the circumstances under which a number of these freedmen were able to become landowners.

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