Finding Enslaved People in Maryland’s Land Records

One of the most useful sources to use when doing local African American genealogy or history is the class of courthouse records known as “Land Records.” In this blog post I’m going to discuss using the online database of Maryland Land Records, specifically for Washington County. These can help you find records of enslaved people, because slaves were considered property, so public records about them were kept in the Land Records.

Every Maryland county had slightly different ways of keeping its records. In some Maryland counties, slave sales were recorded in a separate set of records called Chattel Records. Similarly, in some counties, the manumission (that is, freedom) records were kept separately from the Land Records. In Washington County, both slave sales and manumissions (as well as a less common kind of record called a slave certificate) are filed in the Land Records. This is convenient for researchers.

(Below are step-by-step instructions for using the Washington County Land Records online. But you may find it useful to watch this video from the Maryland State Archives as well. It uses another county, whose records and indexes are different, but use of the website is the same.)

The Land Records are most useful if you know the surname of the white enslaver. (If you don’t, see below for advice on searching for black names.) Let’s say you’re looking for a person or people enslaved by Frisby Tilghman. In the following steps I’ll walk you through a Washington County Land Records search, using the surname “Tilghman” as an example.

Follow these steps:

• Make a free account at mdlandrec.net. You can watch an instructional video here.
• Log in to your account.
• Using the drop-down menu in the upper left, choose Washington County. This will take you to a new screen.
• From the menu at the left, choose “Active Indexes.”
• An index will populate the “Series” dialog box automatically. (It will read: “Land Records, Index, Original, 1776-1977, MSA CE 247.”) This is what you want. Click “Search!”
• Now you’ll see an alphabetical list. Select the letter section you need (for the surname you’re searching for), being careful not to scroll into the later date ranges. (That is, stay in the 1776-1932 section.) Notice that F is out of order. Click on the link in the “Accession No.” column to the right.
• This will take you to a sort of meta-index (an index of the index). Scroll down as needed, to find the surname you’re searching for. (It may be in a group of alternative spellings.) It will have a page number listed to the right of the surname(s). For Tilghman, you’ll have to scroll down to the second page of the T index, where you’ll find that the listed page number is 121.
• Note the page number for the surname (in this case, 121). Over on the right side of the screen, type it into the “page number” box and click “Go!”
• This will take you to the index for the surname you’re interested in, which will probably be multiple pages long. Each line describes a document, with the year at the end of the line (at the far right). They’re in chronological order. On the Tilghman pages, they start in 1778.

Using the Index

• The first six columns are for the names of the people (mostly white) granting and receiving the documents. The eighth and ninth columns give the reference number (to find the document itself), and the last column is the year.
• Notice the seventh column, which describes the kind of document or record. Most Land Records are “deeds,” about land transactions. We’re looking for other records, about people. These are so rarely called deeds that I generally ignore any record listed as a deed in the index. Instead, I look for the following kinds of records:
  * Freedom/D of M (“deed of manumission,” freeing of slave)
  * B of S (bill of sale for something… which might be an enslaved person)
  * Cert/Certif/List of Slaves (“certificate,” registration of slaves being brought into Maryland; these are not “freedom certificates,” which are found elsewhere, not in the Land Records)
  In this index, virtually all records mentioning enslaved persons will be labeled with one of these codes.
• Now, decide which records you want to look at. Make notes of their reference numbers (book and page); I also note down the names and dates, to help me locate the records on the page. Pro tip: My browser doesn’t let me go back to the index once I move on to the record books, so I make all my index notes first, before I start looking at the records. Using the first page of the Tilghman index as an example, we’ll want to look at the first two records listed, a Certificate and a Freedom, and the fourth from the bottom, a Bill of Sale.
• To move to the next page of the surname index, click the “Next” button at the right-hand side of the screen. When we move on to the second page of the Tilghman index and run our eye down the seventh column, we see there are quite a few Bills of Sale (“B of S”) and three Freedoms! So we’ll want to write down the info for all of them. Notice that for Freedoms, the person freed is listed in column 6 as the recipient of the document.
• You’ll want to examine all pages of the surname index through 1864 (when slavery ended in Maryland) or another end year determined by your research. Then you’ll be ready to start looking up the records themselves.

Looking up the Records

• To look up an actual record, click on “JUMP TO A NEW VOLUME” in the yellow bar near the top of the screen.
• This will open a dialog box with spaces for Clerk, Book, and Page. If the Book you want has only a letter or number (for example, P or FF or 130), leave Clerk blank and put the letter or number in the Book box. But if the Book is labeled with both letters and numbers (for example, OHW1 or IN 19, or McKK 3), type the letters into the Clerk box and the number into the Book box. Type the page number into the Page box, obviously, and click “Go!”
• And now you’re looking at the handwritten courthouse copy of the original record. There may be several different documents on the page, so look at the beginning of each one to find the names of the people involved. When you find their names, you’ve found the record.

Pro Tips

• Handwriting: It can be difficult to read these documents. The website lets you enlarge the records and/or “View Document in Separate Tab,” which can be helpful. Practice is helpful. Older adults, who are familiar with cursive writing, may be able to help.
• Dates: Be aware that you’re reading the courthouse record, which was often made days or even years later than the actual event. There may be both a recordation date and also an actual document/event date.
• Finding slave bills of sale: If you’re looking through a lot of bills of sale, searching for records of slave sales, be aware that the sale prices for human beings will almost always be in round amounts and fairly substantial. Also, slaves were almost never included in a bill of sale along with other things (furniture, livestock, wagons, etc.). So as you begin to read the document, when you come to an amount like $147.35 (as opposed to $50 or $300), it’s not a slave sale. If you come to a list of household goods, it’s not going to include people. You can safely stop reading. (The exception, for me, is eighteenth-century documents, which tend to be less standardized.)

Searching for African Americans

What if you don’t know the white enslaver’s name? As you’ve probably gathered by now, the Land Records are organized around landowners and enslavers. Often, in these records, enslaved people are identified only by first names, with no surnames. It can be difficult or impossible to find them if you don’t have an enslaver’s name to start with.

However, there are two ways you may be able to find enslaved people by their own names in the index. The first is by looking up their surnames, on the chance that their surnames were used in the records. (As we saw earlier, the Tilghman manumissions include the full names of the people being freed. These manumissions are also indexed under those people’s names.)

The second way is to go to the index for the letter N and look up “Negro” as if it were a surname. Whoever indexed the Land Records for Washington County decided to index the people who were named in manumission documents as “Negro So-and-so” under the word Negro. This is awful, but at least one subset of manumissions were indexed here. Unfortunately, only manumissions were indexed this way; the people sold in bills of sale were not indexed at all.

Of course, free African Americans who bought and sold land also appear in the Land Records, as property owners. Well before the Civil War, they were establishing themselves in Washington County as farmers and urban homeowners. You’ll find these people in the Land Records too. It takes knowledge and some practice, but the Land Records are a treasure trove of black history, if you know how to use them.