Phil Morgan and I gathered and reported a lot of child registration data in
"Slaves in Piedmont Virginia" published in WMQ April 1989. The piedmont
child registrations and the total slave importations generally move in
tandem, but the up to three month lag between when a slave child could have
arrived and when they were supposed to have been registered before a county
court complicates the possibility of identifying a child's arrival on a
specific slave ship. One has to have other evidence, such as a planter's
actual record of purchase from a broker or slave ship to do that. We
introduce the article with one such case, although of an adult. A very few
runaway ads name a ship that brought a slave in who ran almost immediately
after purchase--Mick Nicholls
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Henry Wiencek" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2007 11:12 AM
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] African American Genealogy


Let me elaborate a bit. One historian has correlated, on a small scale I
believe, surges in local VA court sessions to adjudicate the ages of slaves
with the arrivals of slave ships. So if one could trace one's ancestry back
to a person in a court session, one might be able to line that up with a
specific ship, but I'm not sure. Perhaps the records of that ship would lead
to further discoveries in archives abroad. This is not something I've done
and I'm speaking off the top of my head (perhaps "through my hat," as my
father used to say).

HW