The recipient of the American Society of Genealogists' prestigious Donald Lines Jacobus Award for the best work of genealogical scholarship published between 1991 and 1994, Free African Americans of North Carolina and Virginia is, arguably, the greatest achievement in black genealogy ever published. The new third edition not only updates its illustrious predecessor but is 130 pages longer, treating nearly 300 free African American families and 12,000 individuals of the early national period of U.S. history.
While primarily a genealogical work of extraordinary breadth and detail--covering nearly every colonial North Carolina and Virginia free African American family--Heinegg's opus moves beyond genealogy into social history. Heinegg's exhaustive research in manuscript deeds, wills, county court minutes, tax records, census records, church registers, marriage records, "Free Negro" registers, newspapers, and Revolutionary War pension applications is impressive. It answers several significant questions about the history of people of African descent in colonial and early national North Carolina and Virginia. For example, Mr. Heinegg shows that most of these families were the descendants of white servant women who had children by slaves or free African Americans, and not the descendants of slaveowners. He also dispels many of the myths about the origins and status of free African Americans as well as the "mysterious" origins of the Lumbees, Melungeons, and other such marginal groups. Features like these make Free Black Americans of North Carolina and Virginia a major resource for scholars of colonial and early American history, African American studies, and the South.
The bulk of Mr. Heinegg's book, however--and all persons concerned with African American genealogy are permanently indebted to the author of it--consists of detailed genealogies of about 300 free black families, any number of whom (like the families of humanitarian Ralph Bunche, former NAACP president Benjamin Chavis, and tennis stars Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson) would go on to fame or fortune. This edition traces many families further back to their seventeenth and eighteenth century roots and includes the history of an additional 30 families. Researchers will find the names of the 12,000 African Americans encompassed by Mr. Heinegg's genealogies conveniently located in the full-name index at the back of the volume.
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