Record book with information about enslaved people owned by Hugh Torrance

Source catalog description

This description refers to material held by Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Visual details below describe the original material.

Leather bound volume with ruled interior pages containing records of the people enslaved by Hugh Torrance of Yalobusha County, Mississippi. The front cover has text handwritten in black ink reading "Negro Record." The interior text is handwritten in ink and graphite with information including enslaved people inherited by Torrance from his father as well as those he purchased and sold. There is also a notation about several enslaved men who "left for Yankee land" in December 1862. Several pages contain lists of people grouped as family units, including birth and death dates of parents and children in most cases. The birth dates reach as far back as the first decade of the 1800s, but the record appears to have been written in the 1850s up to 1864. A loose sheet of paper used as a blotter is folded and tucked between pages near the front of the book.

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