So, I was lying on the table as a tech got me ready for a CT Scan, and asking questions. He confirmed what I had assumed: that the intravenous contrasting dye goes everywhere your circulatory system goes. How the results are read depends on what the radiologist looks for, which in turn depends on what the doctor asked for. If he needs information about your kidneys, the report won’t mention your lungs.

This got me thinking about genealogy and family research–the question of “what’s there” vs. “what we’re looking for.” Some people inject “Magruder” into archival records, into a community, into the body politic, to find illustrious connections. I get a small but steady trickle of messages from people interested in royal descent, for example, which doesn’t interest me at all. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some just want to identify a great-grandmother. Sometimes I can help with that, not always.

When I started my Magruder book project I wanted to see what an injection of “Magruder” would show about my family’s involvement in slavery. As neither family trees nor archival records have a natural boundary like that of a single human body, I decided my circulatory system would be limited to Maryland and D.C., with occasional excursions to Virginia.

Within that body of evidence, I would look at two questions.

First, would I find that my relatives and other Magruder descendants had taken part in every aspect of the pernicious institution, from manumissions to slave trading?

Some answers so far:

Claims by descendants (including my grandmother) that an ancestor “freed his slaves” far outnumber manumissions that are visible in the records. The 19th century requirement that free blacks in Maryland carry papers proving their status means that, at least within the time span of that law, the answer is not ambiguous. (My great-great-grandfather, it turns out, was living in D.C. at the time in question, so I am still researching his story.)

And, so far, I have found just one man who (according to one of his half-siblings) signed on as driver for a slave trader trafficking people to the Deep South. Magruders did do business with slave traders, however, both buying and selling human beings. More than a million people were trafficked from the Upper South to the Deep South between 1808 and Emancipation, including a substantial percentage of people enslaved in Maryland and Virginia, and the sale of healthy, young workers was lucrative. Magruders did not stand apart from this reality. In a few cases, Magruders who advertised people for sale (in between ads for hay, cattle, furniture, and shoes) took steps to ensure that they could not be removed from the state.

Second, would my search paths illuminate the lives of any of the thousands of people who were enslaved by Magruders and descendants, from the 1660s to the 1860s?

The answer so far:

A few. The best resources are the so-called Slave Statistics compiled from 1864 (date of Maryland Emancipation) to 1869. These are the affidavits sworn by enslavers who hoped that either the state or the Federal government would compensate them for the loss of their captive laborers. Filing required a second affidavit affirming that the filer had remained true to the Union and not supported the rebellion–which, of course, many could not or would not swear to. The whole process was voluntary and aspirational–compensation did not materialize–so the record is partial, but the affidavits provide each enslaved person’s first and last name and age. This is a tremendous head-start for descendants who are researching their family trees–full name, approximate age, and last enslaver. In some cases, family groupings are clear. Once those relationships have been established, the next question is: how do we get to the next generation back?

A large part of my research in the last ten years has focused on helping with that question by connecting the Slave Statistics for Prince George’s County to the probate, land, and tax records of enslavers. In some cases I have been able to assemble known or likely family lines and siblings by tracing them through several generations of white family records. I have posted about this before and will do so again. In my book, I sometimes pause the narrative to provide explicit information about “Following the Lines” of these families.

And then, of course, I am too curious for my own good.

People, places, events…things surface in my reading that I just have to learn more about. Rabbit holes turn into tunnels. Or should I say that what I thought was a capillary turns out to be an artery.

Which is how the Civil War / Emancipation era came to dominate my research for the last…well, it might be three years. Working title for that section of the book: “When Everything Happened.”

So, it’s time to share. Starting now, I will try to post at least once a week about something in my research. I’m starting with Civil War soldiers–both Yanks and Rebs, most white, two black–whose lives I never would have known about had they not been illuminated by the “contrasting dye” of Magruder descent.