Browse Items (11 total)

  • Tags: family

08_0208_003 and 004 Lucy Brooks.JPG
Enslaved Richmond residents Lucy Goode Brooks and her husband Albert Royal Brooks were permitted to live together as a family. Beginning late in the 1850s, Albert Brooks paid the owner of Lucy Brooks in installments to purchase the freedom of his…

14_0703_007_.JPG
In 1867 a former enslaved man named Peter Wiggins petitioned the Westmoreland County Court to gain custody of the two sons and two daughters he and Malinda Thompson had before the Civil War; but because Wiggins had been married to a woman named Ann…

14_0383_001 Gravely marriage cert.JPG
About six weeks after Virginia's General Assembly passed legislation authorizing county clerks to issue marriage licenses to African Americans, Samuel Gravely and Delia Martin married in Henry County.

08_0614_01 Register children Augusta.JPG
After the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation in 1866 to legalize marriages of formerly enslaved men and women and to legitimate their children. In addition to registering couples, Freedmen's Bureau agents also compiled separate registers of…

08_0613_01 Register Augusta.JPG
After the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation in 1866 to legalize marriages of formerly enslaved men and women, freed couples registered their unions with the Freedmen's Bureau in large numbers. Agents documented their names, ages, names of…

14_0729_13 Circ ltr register.JPG
Virginia's General Assembly passed legislation in 1866 to legalize the "Marriages of Colored Persons now cohabiting as Husband and Wife." Freedmen's Bureau agents were authorized to compile registers of cohabiting couples who considered themselves…

10_0563_001 Jennie Brown ltr.JPG
For decades after the Civil War African Americans searched for family members who had been separated by the domestic slave trade. In 1882, Jennie Brown, of Corinth, Mississippi, wrote to the sheriff of Mecklenburg County, Virginia, to ask about…

15_0707_001 Fleming ltr 1865.JPG
For decades after the Civil War African Americans searched for family members who had been separated by the domestic slave trade. In 1865 Stephen Flemming, who had been sold from Bowling Green, Virginia, to Louisiana about 1849, wrote Governor…

15th Amendment DET Marriage 13-1162-009.jpg
In this detail of his lithograph celebrating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, James Carter Beard illustrated the ability of African Americans ability to marry legally, a right they had been forbidden under slavery.

15th Amendment DET Family 13_1162_009.jpg
In this detail of his lithograph celebrating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, James Carter Beard illustrated the ability of African Americans families to live together without facing the threat of separation as had been the case under…
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