LibGuides: African American Family History: Civil War &amp; Pre-Civil War Records

Fugitive Slave Ads

About Fugitive Slave Ads

Slave owners place ads in newspapers offering rewards for the capture and return of those who defiantly escape enslavement. Ads contain names and descriptions of escapees, including physical and distinctive features, literacy level, specialized skills, and where an escapee might be headed and why.

(Source: The Library of Congress)

Where to Find Fugitive Slave Ads

Freedom on the Move
Freedom on the Move, is a database of searchable digitized fugitive slave ads. It is hosted by Cornell University, in collaboration with several other universities and institutions. Digitized ads can be searched by slave name, slave owner name, and other criteria. This is a crowdsourced project that depends upon volunteers to transcribe and answer questions about the ads to make them searchable.
The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements
This project provides searchable online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 2300 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1840. It is part of the Digital Library on American Slavery.
Chronicling America
The Library of Congress's Chronicling America database provides searchable digital collection of historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963. This guide advises how to find fugitive slave ads in those collections.

Southern Plantation Records

Genealogists Amy Johnson Crow, MLIS, interviews African American genealogy expert Ari Wilkins of the Dallas Public Library's about this highly underutilized collection. Ari Wilkins describes what plantation records are, how to find them, and what they're good for in your genealogy. Whether your ancestor was enslaved, a wealthy plantation owner, or a member of the community (with or without slaves), plantation records can benefit your southern genealogy research.

Index to Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations by Jean L. Cooper
ISBN: 9780786439904
Publication Date: 2009-09-09
Designed for both professional and amateur genealogists and other researchers, this index provides a detailed guide to materials available in the extensive Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations microfilm set. By using this index to identify specific collections in which materials pertinent to a specific family name, plantation name, or location may be found, and then reviewing the details in the appropriate Guides (see Preface), the researcher may pinpoint the location of desired materials. The items indexed include deeds, wills, estate papers, genealogies, personal and business correspondence, account books, slave lists, and many other types of records. This new edition also includes a list of all of the manuscript collections included in the microfilm set.