Commemorating 1619 & celebrating colonial ancestors

The 1619 African arrival

August 1619. Exactly 400 years ago, “20 and odd negroes” arrived at Point Comfort in the British Jamestown, VA colony (present-day Hampton, VA), to be traded for food provisions for their captors. Though 1619 was hardly the beginning of slavery in the Americas, as this article in Smithsonian Magazine explains, it is important for Americans to recognize it, own it and understand its lasting impact.  

The United States of America owes a debt they can never adequately repay to these first Africans — whose toiling and suffering helped transform this land from a floundering colonial outpost, into the wealthiest nation on earth.  If you are unfamiliar with this story or its impact, I encourage you to read the amazing article series from New York Times Magazine and USA Today commemorating the anniversary. USA Today has a particularly stunning interactive illustration of the explosive growth of slavery in the US that is worth experiencing.

As a newly minted African American genealogy blogger (!!!), reading and learning more about the earliest Africans in the British colonies made my thoughts turn to my own ancestors whose American experience began in the same entry point — Virginia. Since it served as America’s gateway into slavery, Virginia has the dubious distinction of being the state with the longest history of enslaving both the people who are native to this land and the Africans who were forcibly brought here. And in a strange way, black people who descend from early Virginian ancestors have an important distinction that emerges from that — our families are some of the oldest in American, white or black.

So, as a personal commemoration, my next couple of posts will honor my ancestors whose American journey began in Virginia. I guess this will be my first official series! I have many stories to tell about their lives and how I discovered them, and I hope anyone who is also researching black Virginia ancestors may glean something useful from what I share. Bear in mind, this is still an active search. I don’t have all the answers and I am stumped in a few places.

The Chavis Family

The oldest ancestral family I have been able to document so far on either my maternal or paternal sides has been the Chavis of Mecklenburg Co, VA. I descend from one Rebecca Chavis (sometimes spelled ‘Chavers’, ‘Chaves’ and ‘Chavous’ in colonial records) who was born around 1721 and died around 1768. She was my 6x great grandmother.

Ironically, the Chavis family are widely known in genealogical circles as having been free people of color (FPOC) at least as far back as the late 1600s. What has fascinated, frustrated and stumped me the most about this family is their origins. How did we know they were free blacks? How did they become free at such an early time in America’s history??

 Much of what I know about them comes from researcher Paul Heinegg’s book Free African Americans of North Carolina and Virginia. According to Heinegg’s research, most of the earliest FPOC families were the descendants of white indentured servant women and enslaved African men. Over 1,000 free children were born to white women by slaves in Virginia during the colonial period and most were freed before a 1723 Virginia law was passed requiring legislative approval before an enslaved person could be freed. I have always assumed that most black people who were free in America before 1864 were either freed in the last will of a slaveowner or they originated from white men who had freed the offspring they created with enslaved women. But the research indicates that this was only true of about 1% of the colonial families who were FPOC.

Decoding Records

A key part of understanding our black ancestor’s lives and stories is being able to decode the records in which they are mentioned.  The earliest known mention of my Rebecca Chavis is a 1734 record in which she was ordered “bound out” by the churchwardens of “Bristol Parish” in what was then Prince George County, VA (this area later became part of Amelia county). Now, what does being “bound out” mean? And what did the church have to do with it? I’m glad you asked!

After being thoroughly confused about this term and how it related to the church, I did some digging into what “parishes” were in colonial Virginia, as well as 17^th and 18^th century laws that concerned slaves and servants. Here’s a very basic primer of what I learned that was key in understanding Rebecca:

• The Church of England (the Anglican Church) was the established church in the Virginia colony and parishes were civil and religious districts created and overseen by the church. Politics and the church were inextricably linked during the colonial period.

• When people were “bound out”, they were basically being bound as a temporary slave to some master. In 1691, the Virginia General Assembly ordered that the children of poor women by “negroes or mulattos” were to be bound out for 30 years by the local churchwardens. And the women themselves were to be sold as indentured servants for a period of five years. So, these poor, mixed-race children were forced into servitude for a set period before being allowed to live free. Seems to me like a way to punish white women for not only being poor, but for having children with enslaved African or Native men.  

This information offered important clues to Rebecca’s origins and answers to my questions about how and when the Chavis family became free! Though no race is mentioned in the 1734 order, the fact that she was ordered bound out means its likely that her parents were an indentured white woman and her father an enslaved black man. We can further conclude that she was born free because children followed the condition of the mother according to colonial law.

The next generation

Unfortunately, there is no mention of either of Rebecca’s parent’s names in the record so it may be impossible to know anything more definitive about the origins of the Chavis family — like where their surname originated from. Luckily, moving forward in time, there are quite a few records mentioning Rebecca and her children. She had 13 children between 1738 and 1761 who were all bound out by the churchwardens of different parishes in which she lived.

The final confirmation of Rebecca’s race and status as a FPOC was a 1760 court order for the churchwardens to bind out her children — James, Ned, Patt and Rebecca (Jr?) — in which she was called a “free Negro”. Her child James who is bound out in this 1760 order is next in my line — my 5x great grandfather! This is as far as I’ve been able to trace Rebecca through Heinegg’s book. I’m not sure where or how she died and there is never any mention of who the father or fathers of her children were. I assume Rebecca must have also had children by an enslaved man since they were all repeatedly bound out. I wish I could know more about the enslaved fathers that the records effectively erased from history.

In my next post, I will continue the Chavis story and talk more about James Chavis and how this family morphed into an entirely different one after leaving Virginia for Ohio in the mid-1800s. Hope you enjoy!