Sometime back, I set myself the delusional goal of documenting every immigrant Sanford (mostly, of course, from England), and (here's the delusional part) linking every Sanford -- since then and down to the present -- with the immigrant Sanford he or she is descended from. Since then, I've been compiling several databases of ancient and recent Sanfords, trying to weave them together into a comprehensive tapestry.
But in the back of my mind was the awareness that in the US there are many black Sanfords. Of course, there is our fictional Uncle Fred, of TV's Sanford & Sons fame. And there is the real Isabelle Sanford, who played the mother on The Washingtons, a spin-off from the old Archie Bunker program, All in the Family.
But where did the real black Sanfords come from? The simple -- and mostly true -- version is that after Emancipation, in 1863, many freed slaves took the name of their master. I wondered to what extent it might be possible to trace black Sanfords back to their pre-Civil-War slave-owners.
As a test-run, I decided to dig deeper into the story in a small test-area. I had already run into the name of John William Augustine Sanford, a slave-owner in central Georgia. More or less at random I started looking at his county, Baldwin County. Prior to the Civil War, there were only about twenty white Sanfords in half a dozen families in Baldwin County (county seat: Milledgeville, also the state capitol until after the War). Several of these families -- including that of John W. A. -- owned slaves -- from one or two up to 150..
In 1850 and again in 1860, the US Federal Census listed all free -- white -- citizens and included additional Slave Schedules, which tallied all slaves owned by each owner, sorted by sex and age (but with no names). The half-dozen Sanford families owned a total of about 240 slaves.
Obviously, after Emancipation there should have been about 240 black Sanfords in Baldwin County, Surprise: The 1870 Census shows only about 60 black Sanfords in Baldwin County, and about the previous number of white Sanfords. My first thought was that many newly freed slaves wanted nothing less than to bear the name of a possibly cruel owner. In particular, one owner, named William Sanford, had about 150 slaves, and probably a number of overseers, and it is possible that his plantation may have been a patticularly unpleasant place to be a slave. My assumption is that where a slave-owner had only a few slaves, the slaves may have been treated more as family, and freed slaves may have been more likely to retain the owner's name.
What happened to the other (projected) 180 black Sanfords? I learned several things
1) The 1870 Census was seriously flawed. Nationwide there was a serious undercount, as indicated by the facte that huge numbers of people absent from the 1870 Census suddenly appeared in the 1880 Census. (And we are not talking here of children born since the last Census, but of adults and older children.) And in the South, the undercount was especially bad. Many Census enumerators were Yankees (carpetbaggers!), who did not know their way around and got little help from the locals. And -- probably -- many former slaves had not left their plantations, may not have been fully aware that they were free or had no place to go, and ended up not being counted in the Census. (Across the whole state of Georgia, in 1880 I found far more black Sanfords -- and somewhat more white Sanfords -- than I had found in the 1870 Census.)
2) The Freedmen's Bureau was active -- along with many volunteer groups, many from Northern churches -- in helping former slaves to get resettled and in helping them get fair contracts for their farm labor. As a result many former slaves moved to different counties or even different states. (Some Freedmen's Bureau documents are available online, but they tend to be very fragmentary and not at all helpful in determining where blacks came from or where they went.) In 1870 and even more in 1880, I found black Sanford families in counties where in 1860 there had been no slave-owning Sanfords.
3) In Baldwin County (and I use this as a typical example -- without knowing if it really is), I found one series of Census pages that suggest that as the enumerator went down a country road in his assigned territory, he recorded forty or fifty black families -- all in a row -- each of which had a different last name -- a Smith family, a Jones family, a Green family, etc. The only conclusion I could draw, since these were families that a decade earlier had been slaves with no last names, was that -- since they were in consecutive order in the Census document -- they had been on the same plantation, but that they had all chosen not to tek the name of the owner, and had all (perhaps with some assistance) chosen different last names.
4) Since the Censuses offer only a few answers to questions about the origins of black Sanfords, it will be nexessary to seek out other documentation to begin to get some definitive answers. (Please let me know if you are aware of some good sources.)
