Now published in three volumes and 400 pages longer than the fifth edition, this work consists of detailed genealogies of hundreds of free Black families, representing nearly all African Americans who were free during the colonial period in Virginia and the Carolinas. It includes 38 additional families not found in the earlier editions, bringing the total to 650 families, and it includes virtually everything available on early free Black families from the public records. The names of more than 13,000 African Americans covered in the genealogies are located in the full-name index at the back of each volume.
Mr. Heinegg has researched some 1,000 manuscript sources, including colonial and early national period tax records, colonial parish registers, 1790-1810 census records, wills, deeds, Free Negro Registers, marriage bonds, Revolutionary pension files, newspapers, and more. The author gives copious documentation and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources in each volume. Mr. Heinegg shows that most of these families were the descendants of white servant women who had children by slave or free African Americans, not the descendants of slave owners. He dispels a number of other myths and demonstrates that many free Black families in colonial Virginia and the Carolinas were landowners.
