Searching for the unnamed...

 Sister Betty and I have been trying to help an new found African-American search for her family history.  This is our first experience extensively searching ancestry for African-American records.  Records prior to 1870 rarely list any identifying information for Black families, not even their names.  

Here are some ways we have found to search Ancestry.com for records prior to 1870.

https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/catalog/?title=slave

will search records that have the word slave in the name of the record

https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1944/

This will search records of the slave narratives.  I am guessing 1944 is the year.  There do not seem to be other years included in these scans... 

Here https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/

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