The names are in the record

In 1860 the census counted 182,566 enslaved people in Texas, 30 percent of everyone living in the state, and recorded almost none of them by name. Seven years later more than 50,000 of those men, freed only two years earlier, registered to vote and gave a board of registrars their name, their birthplace and the year they came to Texas. Those handwritten registers, kept today by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, are the earliest record in which most formerly enslaved Texans appear under their own names. Enslaved Texas puts every one of them back on the map, county by county, free to anyone.

Why the work is needed

The registers were never indexed in full. The public indexes carry a name, a date and a birthplace; the columns that hold each man's history, how long he had lived in Texas, in the county and in the precinct, sit only in the original handwriting, and until now nobody had read them all. Those columns are what turn a name on a list into a life that moved: a birthplace in Virginia, an arrival in Texas about 1847, twenty years in a county the register does not name. For a descendant, that entry is often the first document in which an ancestor appears at all, three years before the 1870 census.

What your gift pays for

Reading the remaining register pages line by line, and checking every entry against the original page by a trained volunteer, so that more than 20,000 freedmen who registered in 1867 and are still waiting to be added take their place beside the rest.
The county pages, the origins pages and the search, where anyone can find an ancestor by name and open the page the registrar wrote.
The interactive map of forced migration into Texas, 1800 to 1870, drawn on the county boundaries of each year.
Hosting the digitized register images and keeping all 50,000 freedmen searchable at no charge.

What a gift does

Every county finished adds its people to the map and to the search by name, birthplace and year of arrival, and every page read puts a family within reach of the descendants looking for it. Enslaved Texas is directed by historian Deborah M. Liles, Ph.D., and built on the archives, the census and the register rather than on estimates. Your support keeps that standard and keeps the result free.

Keep their names alive

Enslaved Texas is a 501(c)(3) public charity; your receipt arrives by email and serves as your record for tax purposes.

Enslaved Texas: Every Name, Every County