May 21 Workshop Lesson: Genealogy at Its
Worse: Researching Convict Records
Research Skill Level:
Beginner, Intermediate, Advance
How can convict records
help with your research? Or do you think perhaps this is research that cannot
possible have anything to do with your family.
Think again!
Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal systems at the end of slavery by state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states to get a free labor force to help rebuild. The paper trail that his system created will be explored in this lecture. Company managers took thousands of black men that they purchased from sheriffs, etc. and placed them in a system that would last well into 1920s.
According to Spivak, in Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang, one out of every nineteen black men over the age of twelve in Alabama was captured in some form of involuntary servitude. Fortunately for the family researcher, a paper trail was left behind to tell the story.
This lesson will focus
on these records using examples created by the prison system in the State of
Alabama. However, all southern states will have the same kinds of records,
but the name of the record might be different.
The Wiregrass Common Heritage Project has been made
possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor
