African American genealogical research often presents additional difficulties because record keeping for Black individuals was limited before the Civil War. For this reason, a separate section devoted to African American resources is appropriate, similar to the approach taken for Native American research, which faces comparable challenges. The resources linked from this page provide the principal sources currently available for researching Black genealogy in South Carolina.
Although progress has been made in recent years, African American genealogy still requires careful, methodical work. New publications, bibliographies, and guides issued by genealogical societies and interest groups have improved access to relevant information, but the first step remains the same: organizing personal materials and applying standard research practices.
Researching African American families involves two broad periods, divided by the Civil War. Methods used for tracing enslaved individuals differ significantly from those used for white families or free African Americans before emancipation. After the war, African Americans appear in most of the same record types as white families, and research techniques largely converge.
National Archives
Archives
Societies
Biography
- African Americans and South Carolina
- Documenting the American South
The Church in the Southern Black Community
Cemeteries
- South Carolina African American Cemeteries
- The First African Baptist Church of North America $$
- Access Genealogy’s Cemetery Records
The most complete coverage of Cemetery records available on the web. They are broken down by county. We do know if there are African Americans in these cemeteries, so you should browse them for ancestors also.
Census Records
- Access Genealogy’s Census Records
Providing the most complete coverage of census records available on the web. We’ve broken the list down by county and take a careful look at the index page where we explain which records are missing from the census data and may never be recovered. - 1870 US Fed Census $$
- Abbeville County
- Clarendon County
- Hampton County
- Lebanon Cemetery, Slave Section
- Marlboro County
- Orangeburg County
- Sumter County
- 1870 Federal Census, Slave Schedule
- Union County
Church Records
- The First African Baptist Church of North America $$
- Historic Liberty Hill A. M. E.
- Beulah Baptist Church
- Erwinton Baptist Church
- Happy Home Baptist Church
- Trinity Methodist Church
- Home Branch Baptist Church 1850-1865
Court Records
- Slavery petitions and papers $$
- Clarendon County Freeholders & Magistrate Court 1863 – 1865
- Pendleton/Anderson District Magistrates and Freeholders Court Records
- Marion County Wills, Slave Records
History
- WPA Slave Narratives. Federal Writers’ Project. Web. 2007-2024.
The WPA Slave Narratives must be used with care. There is, of course, the problem of confusion in memory resulting from (73+ years) of the participants. In addition, inexperienced interviewers sometimes pursued question lines related to their own interests and perspectives and attempted to capture the colloquialism of the informant’s speech. The interviews provide fascinating insight and surprisingly candid information, however. - Black majority : Negroes in colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion
by Peter H. Wood. (New York, New York : Knopf, 1974). - Slavery in the United States. A narrative of the life and adventures of Charles Ball, a black man, who lived forty years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a slave ..
Slaveholders
- Hosted at Slaveholders and African Americans 1860-1870
- Freedman’s Bank Records, 1865-1874
Name index and images of registers for 67,000 people who opened accounts in the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company. This NARA microfilm publication M816 Registers of Depositors in Branches of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company. - 1860 Abbeville Co, SC Slave Schedule
- SC Mortgages of Negroes
- Buying and Selling Human Beings
- Richland County, Former Slaves
- Freedman Contracts Sumter District 1865 & 1866
Military Records
- Military Records
- World War I Records
- WWI Draft Registration Cards $$
- World War II Records
- South Carolina World War II Army – Air Corps Casualty List
- South Carolina World War II Navy – Marines Casualty List
- African Americans in World War II
- African-American Civil War Soldiers & Sailors
- Bureau of Colored Troops – Established May 22, 1863
- African-American Confederate Pensioners
Miscellaneous
Surnames
Vital Records