In the spreadsheet below you will find records for 100,000 Black people who were living in Kentucky during the period of slavery, including over 23,000 men who joined the Union Army during the Civil War. Some entries are for free people of color, but most were enslaved. For each person you will find many pieces of information about them found in various archival records, such as their name, birth year and location, the names of their enslavers, and the name of their parents and spouse if known.
Please note: The embedded spreadsheet is very large and could take a minute or more to load, so please be patient.
Once the spreadsheet is visible, you can click on the icon in the lower right hand corner to open the spreadsheet in a new browser tab, giving you access to all of Excel’s capabilties, including sorting by any field (last name, birth year, etc.) You can find a helpful user guide here which explains the various terms and abbreviations that are used throughout this table, such as Family Code and Owner Code.
A helpful tip: if you sort by Family Code, you can easily find groups of siblings who share a numeric Family Code followed by a letter. Then scroll over to the right to find the fields for the mother and/or father’s name. Using this technique, you can sometimes find two or more generations of a family. Similarly, if you sort by Owner Code, you can find all the people who were enslaved by that person.
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