Abstracts of Slave Information from the Darlington Deed Books
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Sometimes called Book D.
About the abstracts
The Darlington County Historical Commission, a county agency located at 204 Hewitt Street in Darlington,
holds the original deed books. They are also available, as noted, on microfilm from the LDS Family History Library and also
from the South Carolina Department of Archives and History in Columbia. Link to FHL microfilm list.
These abstracts
are intended to provide the basic genealogical information in each document. Lengthy descriptions of land are not included.
When the present deed indexes were created about 1915, slave-related documents as well as other non-land documents were not indexed.
Therefore, these slave entries have remained hidden to the casual researcher.
Edith Palmer of New York City and I began
abstracting the slave information from the deed books many years ago. She worked on Books A and B. I have completed abstracting all
the deed books through 1865, and edited and compared her work and mine with the originals for accuracy and stylistic consistency.
Any errors are mine. You are urged to obtain a full copy of each record, rather than to rely on these abstracts.
In these
abstracts, each document begins with the book and page number(s) of the original, followed by a descriptive word of phrase (like "Bill
of Sale"), and the date of the instrument. An abstract follows, concluding with the names and dates of the acknowledgment or
proof, and the recording date. Where a person's name is expanded from the acknowledgment, that name is expanded in square brackets,
for example M[atthew]. Unless needed for clarity, references to Darlington District are omitted. All references
to other districts (present day counties) are retained.
Although the Darlington court house burned in 1806, destroying the deed books, for a few years the state required that abstracts of deeds be sent to it. Copies are extant at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History for scattered years for Darlington District between 1789 and 1795. The full texts, including land transactions, were published in the South Carolina Magazine of Ancestral History. These documents are known as "Memorialized Records."
In the abstracts, I have followed the original document's capitalization and spelling for the word "Negro." The repetition of uncapitalized or non-standard spelling in this instance does not reflect modern acceptable practice, and I have retained it only as having some potential historical interest or value.
Note that that there is one volume labeled Book CD (sometimes called Book C or Book D). There is no Book J. Book S is lost.
Links to Each Deed Book: