Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware from the Colonial Period to 1810

Description

Paul Heinegg, who previously won the prestigious Donald Lines Jacobus prize for genealogical scholarship for his work on the free black population of Virginia and North Carolina, now brings us the companion volume: Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware from the Colonial Period to 1810. As he did for free blacks in North Carolina and Virginia, Paul Heinegg has reconstructed the history of the free African American communities of Maryland and Delaware by looking at the history of their families. First and foremost, Mr. Heinegg has assembled genealogical evidence on more than 300 Maryland and Delaware black families (naming 6,000 individuals), with copious documentation from the federal censuses and colonial sources consulted at the Maryland Hall of Records, county archives, and other repositories. Among other findings, he proves that most of these free black families descended from mixed-race children who were the progeny of white women and African American men.