Finding My Enslaved Ancestors in the Inventory Records of the Slaveholder

Slavery Inventory of Jesse and Martha Vining
Dr. Antoinette Harrell ancestors, Courtesy of the St. Helena Parish Clerk's Office

It's very hard for me to comprehend why African American History is still a subject that most people do not like to talk about in Tangipahoa and St. Helena Parishes in 2020. My genealogy adventure has taken me down many dusty roads and busy interstate to learn about my direct family history. While driving down the dusty, lonely roads, my mind seems to drift off in a time and period. Looking on both sides of the road and looking at the trees and old wooden building is now falling. 

I can almost feel the stories that these trees and lonely roads want to tell me—driving on the land where formerly enslaved people of St. Helena Parish once worked from sun up to sun down in the blistering summer heat and the cold winter whispering days. Somehow I feel like Alex Haley felt when he went to Gambia, Africa tracing the "Roots" of Kunta Kinte. Kunta Kinte was born in 1750 in Gambia and kidnapped and sold into slavery in America. Kunta Kinte died in 1822.

My Richardson, Vining, and Bates family research ties to St. Helena Parish. There is something that pulls at me always to research their history. "Who was the first person in my family that touch the soil of America?" I know I had to search the Clerk's office records until I could find them. The painstaking research wasn't easy; I realized that. The pain causes the tears to stream down my face until I could see a

Dr. Antoinette Harrell
St. Helena Parish Clerk's Office

clearing. 

After going inside the vault and looking at the many files that seem to be at least fifteen feet tall, I look up and down, and somehow, I knew I would find them because they wanted to be found. The first slave records I found were Carrie and her child Thomas who was owned by Benjamin and Celia Bankston Richardson. I was looking at their names in this cursive writing, and a deep saddest hit my heart. "'I realized that on this day," my Carrie and her child was being sold. Who are the other people listed on the inventory? "Could this be people that are related to Carrie?

Soon afterward, I started looking at my Vining family and found that they were owned by Jesse and Martha Vining in St. Helena. I discovered my ancestors; One Negro named Frank age 18 of yellow color valued at $700.00, One negriss named Thursday age 20 years old and her child valued at $700.00, one negro woman named Judia age 25 years value at $600.00, and one negro man named Ben age 22 years old, yellow color valued at $700.00.

I'm so grateful to Alex Haley for the book called "Roots" and teaching African-Americans like me who are thirsty for knowledge of self and the history of family history. I feel enriched knowing that I have studied my own