User:Africana Heritage

User: Africana Heritage

The University of South Florida Africana Heritage Project is an all-volunteer research project and website dedicated to rediscovering records that document the names and lives of slaves, freedpersons and their descendants, and sharing those records on our free Internet site at USF Africana Heritage Project. The USF Africana Heritage Project is sponsored by the Africana Studies department at USF.

We are currently working on a research project to document the genealogy and history of enslaved communities on plantations owned by the Drayton family of Charleston, South Carolina. You can read about the project below:

Genealogy of Enslaved Communities on Drayton Family Plantations: A Research Project Sponsored by the Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Charleston, SC

In the first-ever project of its kind, members of a former slaveholding family and descendants of those they once enslaved have come together to rediscover their shared history.

The Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Charleston, South Carolina is sponsoring genealogical research to rediscover the names, family relationships and life stories of enslaved Africans and African Americans on Drayton Family plantations in Barbados and the United States.

The Drayton and associated Grimke families owned plantations in Barbados; Charleston, South Carolina; Hilton Head and Kiawah Islands, South Carolina; St. Augustine, Florida and Brazoria, Texas.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation and Drayton Hall Plantation of Charleston, South Carolina, holders of the Drayton family papers, are major partners in this research, conducted by the University of South Florida Africana Heritage Project.

Dallan Quass and the folks right here at WeRelate, the world's largest genealogy wiki, are major Internet partners in the project. They have customized WeRelate with features and categories which make sense for African American genealogy and slave genealogy research.

If your family has ties to Drayton and Grimke family plantations and you would like to join this historic research, we would love to hear from you. We would also like to hear from genealogists and historians who have documents to share which name Drayton family slaves. We welcome your participation and will gratefully acknowledge your contributions! You can write to us at info@africanaheritage.com.

The first phase of this research, documenting the family lineages of known descendants of Drayton family slaves, is complete, and we are now posting the lineages here at WeRelate. Here are links to the family pages we have created thus far. We will be adding new pages as resarch progresses, so please check back often!

Family:Adam Bennett and Hannah Bennett (2)

Family:Willis Johnson and Rebecca Bowens (1)

You can read more about this research by following the links below:

Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Charleston, SC to Sponsor Lowcountry Africana Website Internet Archive of Plantation, Slave Records

Insight Into Slave History: Project Will Put Names With Faces By Brian Hicks, The Charleston Post and Courier

To learn more about Magnolia Plantation and Drayton Hall Plantation, please follow the links below:

Magnolia Plantation and Gardens

Drayton Hall Plantation