The property listed in an 18th century Fairfax County man’s will included custard cups, silver, rugs—and slaves.
The man was George Mason V, whose father, George Mason IV, is the namesake of George Mason University as well as of a high school in Falls Church, Va.
Mason history major Georgia Brown, an intern at the Fairfax Circuit Court Historic Records Center in the Historic Fairfax County Courthouse, has spent much of 2015 delving into the wills, probate records and deed books belonging to residents like Mason who owned black slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Her goal is to create a slavery index, which she hopes will provide answers for those who have questions about their ancestry—questions not so easily answered by popping a name into a genealogy website.
So what makes Brown, a white military veteran from Oregon, spend months combing through hundreds of pages of fragile documents to create a slavery index?
“I think it’s better to acknowledge [slavery] and to study it, than hiding it or trying to hide it,” she said.
“I think people still try to gloss over how tied slavery was [to] our society. People never think about how involved it was in building up the Virginia economy because it is something uncomfortable that people want to shy away from,” said Emily Martin, a Mason history major assisting Brown with the project.
Brown writes the slave’s name, owner and any details she finds about the person—physical description, age, and so forth—on a standard index card. She also creates an index card for each slave owner and for the purchasers, making the slavery index searchable by slave name and owner name.
In his will, George Mason IV gave 47 slaves to family members, Brown said.
“This isn't to say there weren't many more slaves, and unfortunately we don't have any inventories of the [Mason] IV or [Mason] V estates, but for sure there were 47 slaves,” she said. “George V listed 95 slaves, many with the same names listed in George IV's will.”
Brown is sometimes able to trace the life of a slave through documents and accounting records—owners sometimes borrowed against the cost of a slave.
“It was like a mortgage. Sometimes they foreclosed, essentially,” Brown said.
In those cases, the slave was transferred to another owner and that person’s name would show up in the new owner’s estate records.
There are also deeds of emancipation, an official document freeing of a slave by an owner. Because she’s primarily examining wills, she hasn’t encountered many emancipation deeds, Brown said, but some she’s seen are eloquently written and filled with feeling.
“In other documents, slaves are listed right next to the horses and the silverware—that’s why we get so excited when we see some emotion,” she said.
Brown is searching records spanning from 1742 until just after the Civil War. Though slaves were emancipated by then, many are still mentioned in estate matters settled after the war, she said.
Brown is working closely with Katrina Krempasky, archivist at the Historic Records Center, and assistant archivist Heather Bollinger. Maddy McCoy, a local African American historian, is also working on the project.
“We have 1,800 [Fairfax County] slave owners so far in our records and that is not counting those mentioned in other people's accounts,” Brown said. She expects the list to be at least twice that long once the project is complete.