About the records of enslaved people

What is here

2,018 records from 1754 to 1867 that sold, gave, mortgaged, divided, hired, freed or taxed enslaved people in Orange County, with 5,287 name appearances (a person named in several records is counted in each). Most come from the county’s deed books; others from its will books, its tax list of 1755, and the county’s bills of sale and slave records at the State Archives of North Carolina. With them are the 906 marriages freed couples registered in 1866.

• Deed (sale or gift not stated): 1,453
• Deed of trust: 261
• Sheriff's or court sale: 56
• Mortgage: 42
• Sale: 41
• Division of an estate: 31
• Agreement: 27
• Tax list: 23
• Release or receipt: 22
• Marriage contract: 14
• Deed of gift: 11
• Power of attorney: 11
• Will or bequest: 10
• Other: 9
• Emancipation: 5
• Hire: 2

Where the records come from

The Orange County Register of Deeds’ Expanded Collection of All Sales of Enslaved People in Orange County (2021) brought together abstracts of these records made by Mark Chilton, then Register of Deeds, with Deputy Register James Bartow and student interns Rae Hoyle, Merisa Tomczak and Khadija McNair. Each record here gives the facts of one abstract: the date, the book and page, the parties, and every enslaved person named, with their ages and the family ties the record states. The short descriptions are ours.

10 records were not in the compilation, which seems to have been gathered by searching for words such as “Negro” and “slave”. Abstracts that name people only with their ages, or as “a woman and her child”, slipped through. We found these by reading Chilton’s deed-book abstracts and by comparing UNC Greensboro’s People Not Property catalog of North Carolina slave deeds, which also links each deed it holds. Each such record says where it comes from.

The 23 tax-list records are the households in the county’s first surviving tax list, of 1755, that name the enslaved people they held. We read the list from the manuscript’s page images in the State Archives of North Carolina; the whole list is with the tax lists. Other households in it counted Black tithables without naming them.

The 1866 marriages come from Mark Chilton’s transcription of the county’s Freedmen’s Marriage Book, Jumped the Broom.

How the names were read

A computer extraction of the compilation found most names but missed some in long lists and took some months, horses and owners for people. So every record was then read again by hand, name by name, and the two readings were compared. Every name kept here appears in its record as written; spellings are not corrected, and a second reading the record gives (“Mustiffer [Mustafa]”) is kept beside the first.

Family ties are shown only where the record states them (“Jenny and her four children”). People listed next to each other are not assumed to be related. No person is matched from one record to another: two records naming a Hannah may or may not mean the same woman.

Keep in mind

• The records were written by and for enslavers. They record people as property and say little about the people themselves.
• These are abstracts, not the original documents. Deed-book pages can be seen at the Register of Deeds through the link on each record. Check the original before relying on a reading.
• Prices are left out. Ages are given as the record states them.
• The records quote the terms of their time, such as “Negro” and “mulatto”. Our descriptions do not.
• Most enslaved people in the county never appear in a deed. Wills, estate files, tax lists and court records name many more; this collection is a start, not a census.

To report a misreading or a missing record, write to us.

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