Finding Slaves in Boyle County

Date: 1842 to 1905
Location: Boyle, Kentucky, United States

These can be modified for any county.

How to find records of enslaved and emancipated African Americans in Boyle County. The records are found in scanned images, often not indexed, but the names and o there identifying information is there.

This is a guide on how to find the records, much thanks to Lisa Christensen for detailing the how to step by step instructions.

Lisa Christensen
10:17 AM (3 hours ago)
to me

Hi Karen,

My total for Union County is lower than the published number. My list currently has 3138 people. I’m sure the difference is a combination of errors on both sides—so it will be good combine data from both lists. I have created profiles for 1243 people in my list. I can’t give you a useful estimate of how long it took to create them because the 1880 census wasn’t my focal point. I started with records that linked enslaved people with slave owners (baptisms, deeds and probates) and tried to locate them in the 1870 and/or 1880 census. I’ve been whittling away at Union County for 3 years.

To find non-traditional records that contain information about enslaved people on FamilySearch, look at the menu bars at the top of the page. If there is one menu bar, click on Search, then choose Catalog from the dropdown menu. If there are two menu bars at the top of the page, Catalog will be one of the choices in the lower bar. On the catalog search page enter the county and state name in the search box (searching by Place is the default mode). In the example below, you will see that FamilySearch found the correct location before I finished typing in Kentucky. Once the correct location is highlighted in green press the Enter/Return key to autofill the search box. Then press the Enter/Return key again to search for records in that location.

Land deeds and slave deeds will be found in the Land and property group. Click on the little gray triangle to the left of United States to see the full list. Unfortunately, the records only go back to 1842. But, they go up to 1905. So, you’ll be able to search for slave owner records as well as land purchases by emancipated slaves. For some reason, some deeds have a film reel icon which means they haven’t been digitized. I’m not sure what’s going on with FamilySearch. Many of these used to be available online a year ago….now they’re not available. This has been driving me crazy with the Union Co. tax records. I was going to give you a hint to quickly find some slave deeds in the indexes, but it won’t work for Boyle county because Boyle county doesn’t have a deed description. In Union county, slaves can be found in any records that contain the word slave or personal property in the description. The only way to find those records is to look at all the deeds for a specific slave owner or go thru the deed books page-by-page.

Emancipation records can be found in the Court records, Order books for the County Court. Some emancipations will be listed in the index at the front of the book, like here https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C9PK-DSSR-Z?i=11&cat=430503. Look for the entry Christopher Jared - freedom of &c - 148. Go to page 148 (image 111) https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C9PK-DSSK-W?i=110&cat=430503 and you’ll find the emancipation entry for a man named Jared who was emancipated by Henry Christopher. You probably won’t find all the emancipations, but you could quickly find quite a few of them this way. Creating profiles for the emancipated or free people listed in the index would be a great, reasonably sized project for one person.

The Slavery and bondage section contains a bill of sale for slaves of Zachariah Garnett of Boyle County in 1849. And……it’s not available online. I’ll be in Salt Lake City at the end of February. I’ll see if I can digitize that section of the microfilm while I’m there.

You can find some birth and death records for slaves born/died from 1852 to 1858 in the Vital Records section (Births, marriages, deaths authored by Boyle County Clerk of the County Court). The images for Boyle County begin on image 319. The slaves will be mixed in with the white entries. Creating profiles for these slaves would also be a nice project for someone.

More records can be found for places within Boyle County. There is a gray box above the list of records for Boyle County. Click on the blue text “Places within United States, Kentucky, Boyle. There are additional records for Danville, Forkland, Junction City and Perryville. I peeked at Danville, Church Records, Danville Presbyterian Church 1826-1866. I found entries for “colored” members who were admitted in 1837, 1825, 1840, etc. (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C339-T9YR-3?i=171&cat=446097)

Since most of the oddball records at FamilySearch are not indexed, these would make good indexing/profile creating projects for someone who wanted to work on something other than the 1880 census project.

So much opportunity… :-)

Lisa