This month’s US Black Heritage 1880 Census Project focus on WikiTree is the state of Mississippi, specifically Alcorn, Lafayette, and Marshall counties. I suggested Lafayette and Marshall (as a member of the USBH Mississippi team) because I’ve previously focused on them (mostly Lafayette because a lot of my more recent paternal ancestors were from there), but I decided to work on Marshall exclusively this month because only 1% of the black people in the 1880 census for Marshall County were recorded on the tracking spreadsheets as of September 1st (out of 18,587 people total). Anyone can help out with the project. All you need to do is create a WikiTree account and agree to the Honor Code.
What is the purpose of this project?
This monthly project is part of a larger US Black Heritage 1880 Census Project whose purpose is connect enslaved ancestors with their descendants because slavery and its after-effects cut people off from their family history. We’re focusing on the 1880 census because it’s the first one in which household relationships were recorded. Each month has a different focus state.
Interesting observations
- Marshall had a much larger black population than Lafayette in 1880 (over twice as large at 18,587 people).
- Census records are more likely to be found for people in Marshall than for people in Lafayette. My theory for why is because of the much larger black population (it’s possible that people in Marshall felt safer being recorded in the census than the people in Lafayette).
- Because more census records exist, it’s easier to see connections between families and to trace people’s lives.
- A lot of people from Marshall moved to Tennessee and Illinois, which means that I can often find a death record that links them to their parents and lets me know who they married (the State of Mississippi has only digitized death indexes and the records don’t have much information, so it’s often impossible to be sure that a particular record is the correct one).
Why I do this
I collaborate with the US Black Heritage Project because it’s gives me the opportunity to help others and contribute to an area of US genealogy that has often been neglected. When I started doing genealogy research in 2021 my goal was to build my personal family tree to help my cousin identify her biological father, but I discovered that genealogy research is interesting in general and continued doing it for other people when I hit roadblocks in my personal research.
I’ve been greatly enjoying my work on this month’s project. One of my “special surnames” is Pegues (I’ve previously written about this interest) and there were over 50 people with the surname in Marshall County in 1880. When I research a Pegues I also research their descendants to present day, so I discovered several intermarriages with other families who were also recorded in the 1880 census. During the entire first week of September, I was solely working on one large web of intermarried families. I often started researching someone’s spouse and then realized that the spouse’s name was familiar because I’d previously researched their family. In at least one case, the spouse’s parents were already on WikiTree.
The Pegues family I started with this month was that of Bailey Pegues who was originally from South Carolina. He had at least eight children with his wife Emmaline. I’m fairly confident that Augustus Pegues was also their child even though there are no records with this information because he named one of his sons Bailey and another son Silas (the elder Bailey also had a son named Silas) and he was living near Bailey’s widow in 1880. There were also three additional people attached to Bailey as his descendants by another FamilySearch user (Phosey, Archie, and Israel), but there isn’t enough evidence (so far) to declare them his children. All three (and Augustus) had moved out of their parents’ home before the 1870 census was enumerated (the 1870 census is earliest census that Emancipated people were recorded in). I added Bailey and Emmaline to WikiTree and checked Emmaline off on the tracking spreadsheet.
Bailey and Emmaline’s daughter Louisa lived with them in 1870 but married and moved out before 1880. She and her new family had their own 1880 census household near Augustus and her mother, so I also added everyone in their household to WikiTree and checked them off the spreadsheet. I’m now at the original starting family (+1 new family). Then, during my research of Louisa’s husband Charlie Balfour, I found his parents’ 1880 census record (+1 new family).
Their daughter Delia also married and moved out after 1870. In 1880, she was living with her husband Sam Davis Jr. and his family (+1 new family). Their daughter Bettie married William T. Jones and moved into his family’s home before 1880 (+1 new family). Missouri married Stephen Pointer (+1 new family). At this point in my research, I’ve branched out into five additional families beyond the original.
Of the six children who were living with Emmaline in 1880 (one was a cousin and the other was a grandchild), Martha and Mark also married people whose families had an 1880 census record. That’s two more families added and checked off on the spreadsheet. The total number of families I’ve added is now seven.
Augustus Pegues also had his own 1880 census record with his wife and six children. His daughter Sylvia married Spencer Glover in 1885 who was living with his family in 1880 and they have a census record (+1 new family). His son Silas married Annie Clayborn in 1902 whose parents have a record (she was born in about 1883) and then later married Phyllis Powers whose parents not only had a record but they also had already been added to WikiTree by someone else and Phyllis’s maternal grandparents also had an 1880 census record (+2 new families). Phyllis’s elder brother James Powers Jr. married Bailey’s granddaughter Mattie Jones (the parents of James’s first wife, Sallie Echols, also have a census record) (+1 new family).
In the end, I added 11 additional families to WikiTree before publishing this post because of their connection to my starting family. The work of adding connections is ongoing. I wish there was a way to see Bailey Pegues’s family’s connections to other families in Marshall County as a graph because I’m sure it would be interesting.