Historian
Fountain Rock was a plantation about six miles south of Hagerstown, Maryland, from 1792 to 1825. In the antebellum years, the same site was home to the College of St. James (1841-1864), forerunner of today’s St. James School. …
Continue Reading about Slavery at Fountain Rock and St. James
Tucked away in an obscure corner of Halfway, outside of Hagerstown, an overgrown half-acre is all that remains of what was once a sprawling burial ground for Hagerstown’s African American community. Most of the “Halfway …
Continue Reading about The Halfway African American Cemetery: A Lost Burial Ground
Every “runaway” slave advertisement tells a story. No life story is ever complete, but as historians we try to piece together the evidence of past lives and tell the stories of people who can no longer speak for themselves. …
Continue Reading about David Davis, Enslaved Blacksmith and Resister
Slave resistance has a long and honored history in our nation. Leaders like Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, who planned armed uprisings, are famous figures in black history. Resistance took other forms, too, from verbal …
Continue Reading about Slave Resistance at Antietam Iron Works
If you do African American genealogy, you’ve no doubt heard about the “brick wall” of 1870. That’s the year of the first post-Emancipation U.S. federal Census. Before 1870, we have to rely on records from the era of slavery, …
Continue Reading about Using Census Records for Black Family History before 1865
Finding Otho: The Search for Our Enslaved Williams Ancestors, by Kathy Lynne Marshall, officially hits the bookstores today. I wrote the foreword for this book, which is a rare work on black family history in Washington …
Continue Reading about Finding Otho, a New Book about Local African-American Genealogy
