[honeychile]

Charlestown did become Charleston. A great book to read is "Slaves in the Family" by Edward Ball. A lot of people whose ancestors had slaves can relate to his confusion on the issue. To my knowledge, no one in my family did, but I teach a local history mini-class and you'd be surprised how many people are shocked to see slavery outside of the traditional South!

I forget who mentioned the Mormons - that's the LDS site (Church of the Latter Day Saints). They prefer to be called LDS for the most part.

My understanding is that there are really good records in what used to be the Ivory Coast (West Ghana? I'm showing my ignorance of world geography!) on the slave industry. I haven't done any major slave genealogy (yet), but I'm pretty sure that you trace backwards from freedom to the owner to the first African descendant, to the boat and to the "Castle" in Africa where most slaves were held prior to being sent to America. Our genealogical society (Western PA GS) has a whole special interest group on African American heritage; the former head of the National Archives (James Walker) is black, and had a wealth of information to share.

It gets a little upsetting to use words like "own" and "property", doesn't it? People forget that one of the first people to die in the American Revolution was black (Crispus Attucks), and that there was at least one black freeman at the founding of Jamestown!