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I want to research enslaved ancestors (Beyond Kin methodology)

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Use this when you’re researching African American genealogy across the 1865 documentary divide. Pre-emancipation, enslaved ancestors typically appear as named property in slaveholder records — probate appraisements, sale bills, advancements to heirs, plantation account books — rather than in vital records. The Beyond Kin Project methodology treats these records as the documentary surface for reconstructing family relationships before emancipation. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a slaveholder’s probate packet structured as a parent source with its component documents, named enslaved individuals tracked as a source role, and a workflow that scales as more records surface.

What you’ll need
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  • Charted Roots v0.22.17 or later (source-roles and source-hierarchy features required).
  • At least one slaveholder probate packet, will, estate inventory, or appraisement to start with. Sale bills and plantation account books work too.
  • Familiarity with the Beyond Kin naming conventions. This guide uses them but doesn’t reproduce them.

Steps
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1. Create the parent source for the record group
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A probate packet is a multi-document record group: a will, an inventory, an appraisement, an advancement, a sale bill, and final settlement papers may all be one packet. Model the packet itself as a source note, then create child source notes for each document.

Right-click your sources folder → New sources base from template, or use the Create Source modal from Control Center → Sources. Frontmatter for the packet:

cr_type: source
cr_id: src_hardwick_probate_packet
title: "William H. Hardwick Probate Packet (1863–1870)"
source_type: probate
source_repository: York County, South Carolina, Probate Court

2. Create child source notes for each component document
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For each document in the packet (appraisement, sale bill, advancement, etc.), create a separate source note and link it to the parent via source_parent:

cr_type: source
cr_id: src_hardwick_appraisement_1864
title: "Hardwick Estate Appraisement (1864)"
source_type: probate
source_parent: "[[William H. Hardwick Probate Packet (1863–1870)]]"
source_parent_id: src_hardwick_probate_packet

The dual source_parent + source_parent_id properties give you Obsidian backlink visibility plus reliable id-based resolution.

3. Track named enslaved individuals via source roles
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On each component document, list the enslaved individuals named in that document under the enslaved_individuals role:

enslaved_individuals:
  - "[[Mary]]"
  - "[[Peter]]"
  - "[[Susan]]"

Each entry is a wikilink to a person note. Create the person notes as you go — Beyond Kin practice typically uses the given name plus an indicator of the slaveholder (e.g., Susan (Hardwick)) since surnames usually aren’t recorded for enslaved persons in pre-emancipation documents.

You can use the Create/Edit Source modal’s Person roles section instead of editing YAML directly: expand the section, click Add person, pick from the picker, choose Enslaved individuals as the role.

4. Capture transfers as the documents reveal them
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Appraisements value enslaved persons as estate property; advancements distribute them to heirs; sale bills name buyers. Each of those is a transfer event — a change in who has legal control over the person — that’s worth recording.

For each named individual, set ownership properties on the person note:

cr_type: person
cr_id: person_mary_hardwick
name: "Mary"
property_of: "[[Reuben Hardwick]]"
held_at: "[[Hardwick Plantation]]"
appraised_value: 350

These represent the current/final state. To track changes over time (Mary appraised in 1864, advanced to a daughter in 1866, sold in 1869), create transfer event notes. The charted-roots-transfers block on the person note will display them chronologically.

5. Use FAN-cluster roles to capture community networks
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A sale bill names buyers; an appraisement names appraisers; a will names executors and witnesses. These are all members of the slaveholder’s FAN (Friends, Associates, Neighbors) network — and many of them are themselves slaveholders, future buyers, or kin to the family you’re researching.

Track them with the standard role categories on the source note:

officials:
  - "[[James Wilson|James Wilson (Appraiser)]]"
witnesses:
  - "[[Thomas Brown|Thomas Brown (Will witness)]]"
others:
  - "[[Samuel Davis|Samuel Davis (Buyer at sale)]]"

See the FAN clusters guide for the analysis workflow once these networks are populated.

6. Work around name normalization until #517 ships
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Beyond Kin’s placeholder names (single-name entries, surname-deferred conventions) can be flagged by Charted Roots’ “Normalize name formatting” Data Quality operation. Until #517 ships per-note exclusion, the workaround is: when running normalize names, review the preview list and uncheck entries that use your Beyond Kin conventions before applying. The operation is interactive — you choose which changes go through.

Variations
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  • Single-document starting point. If you don’t have a full probate packet yet — just an isolated appraisement, for instance — skip steps 1 and 2 and create that document as a standalone source. Add the parent source later when more documents in the same group surface.
  • Plantation account books and ledgers. These often record both forced labor and individual identifiers across years. Model the book as a parent source with monthly or annual entries as children. Same role-tracking pattern.
  • Pension files (1865+). USCT pension applications often name still-living enslaved kin and former slaveholders. Track applicants as principals, named relatives as family, and former slaveholders in others with role detail in the wikilink display text.
  • Terminology preference. This guide uses “Enslaved individuals” and “Slaveholder,” following the convention adopted in #189. Other practitioners use “Slave” / “Enslaver”; both are valid within the community. The frontmatter property is fixed (enslaved_individuals) but role display text and prose terminology are yours to choose.

Related guides#

Reference
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