Rare historic document find reveals details of slaves' lives

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

The Library of Virginia has conserved a document found in the Smyth County courthouse that could prove invaluable to students of local African-American genealogies and other historians.
Titled “The Register of Colored Persons of Smyth County, Virginia, cohabitating together as Husband and Wife on 27th February 1866,” and hand-penned in ink long-since oxidized but still legible, the document “is the first legal recognition of slaves’ marriages and the first legal recognition of their lives,” said Circuit Court Clerk John Graham.
In a release LOV said the register “offers insight into many aspects of the lives of local slaves and freed slaves found nowhere else. The entries reveal a broad array of information of interest to genealogists and historians. Of note is the wide range of localities reported as the former slaves’ places of birth. The register records the name of husband, his age, place of birth, residence, last owner, last owner’s residence, name of his wife, her age, place of birth, residence, last owner, last owner’s residence, name and age of each child, and date of the start of cohabitation.”
Carl M.C. Childs, LOV director of local records services, was at the courthouse in Marion Monday and Tuesday. “The most powerful part of this is for African American genealogists who are told nothing exists before the war,” he said, referring to a lack of documentation of enslaved families prior to the Civil War. “This shows some who were married in the 1830’s and 1840’s, well before the war.”
The documentation of children in most of the record’s 90 marriages makes the register a previously unavailable tool for researchers, Graham said. The clerk noted property records on file in the courthouse from before the Civil War show slaves owned, and the taxes paid on them, but offer no personal information about the slaves and their familial connections.
For Graham, the register reveals a little recognized facet of local history. “I think it is a humbling acknowledgement that slavery was here, and not just out there someplace else,” he said. For the release Graham told LOV, “When you see this document, you're reminded that slavery was not just an institution somewhere in the South. It was a way of life right here in Smyth County. This remarkable document brings history home.”
Childs agreed. “The stereotype” of Virginia slavery, he said, “is in Southside, in Eastern and Central Virginia. They populated the entire state. They were all over the state.”
The document shows married slaves registered in 1866 in Smyth County but previously having lived in other places, like Grayson and other counties in the region, counties as distant as Fauquier, Culpeper and Loudon in Virginia, and as far away as South Carolina.
Both men and women are recorded, as are their last owners. A list of Smyth County slave owners’ surnames reads like a local Who’s Who: Preston, Taylor, Orr, Sanders, Spratt, Sheffey, Greever, Tate, McCarty, Buchanan, Beatie, to name but a few.
The slaves have surnames less associated with Smyth County, among them Logan, Royster, Bolin, Tigles, Ridicks.
“We were taught in school that freed slaves took their master’s name,” Childs said. “There are a few.” These represent the exception rather than the rule, according to the register.
The LOV is unequivocal in its estimation of the document’s importance: “The information about individuals contained in this register is priceless, as for many it is the first time a former slave appears officially in the public record and because of the range of information included. It provides direct evidence of family relationships for those born and married under slavery. Not every locality created a register and in some cases those that had registers did not keep them. Those that preserved the registers hold a treasure trove of history.”
According to Childs, the Smyth register is one of 20 known in Virginia. He said the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Federal Reconstruction-era Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, directed freed slaves to register at their county courthouses and court clerks to send the records to the bureau. Many clerks, however, retained the records locally, Childs said.
In the Smyth register’s case, the document was found years ago, and re-filed. “Only one person in the office knew anything about it,” a deputy clerk whose work did not involve the document, Graham said.
But outside the office, an LOV employee knew about it and mentioned it while in contact with the clerk’s office on another matter, according to Graham.
That triggered a search this spring for the record that was unbound to other records and not catalogued, Childs said.
At some point the deputy clerk caught wind of the document hunt, and opened a file cabinet drawer where it had been tucked safely away.
The Smyth document comprised three pages, “but only two required treatment, which was to surface clean, flatten, repair with heat set tissue and deacidify with methyl magnesium oxide spray,” also known as Bookkeepers Solution, Library of Virginia Public Information and Policy Coordinator Jan Hathcock said Monday.
Childs said the conservation procedure is reversible in case future conservators using newer techniques determine a better method has become available.
LOV has also undertaken a comprehensive cataloguing effort to inventory all of the records in the clerk’s office. The five LOV professionals doing that work could uncover other jewels in the archives, said Childs, who acknowledged the inventory list itself would be a jewel for researchers.
Childs said LOV has provided about 1,000 grants totaling almost $15 million to localities for permanent records preservation, management and security.
“Some of which have been received here at the request of Mr. Warren,” Graham said, referring to his predecessor, the late Jimmy Warren.
Recordation fees collected by court clerks’ offices support that program, Childs said.

To read the register
View the records in “The Register of Colored Persons of Smyth County, Virginia, cohabitating together as Husband and Wife on 27th February 1866” at http://static.mgnetwork.com/swv/media_path/-temp/smythcohab.pdf

Searchable versions of Smyth’s and 19 other localities’ cohabitation registers are available at www.virginiamemory.com/collections/whats_new