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Table of Naming Practices among the Bennehan-Cameron Plantation Slaves, Orange County, North Carolina, 1778–1842

This table records the names of enslaved children and their parents on a North Carolina plantation over 65 years. Enslaved Africans and African-American slaves on this plantation purposefully established naming practices to link slave families and kin networks. The patterns and domestic relations they reflect indicate the mores and values of a social class in formation. They also show how slaves adapted to the harsh realities of enslavement, where families were often separated by sale or death.


Source | Adapted from Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750—1925, (New York: Random House, 1976).
Creator | Herbert Gutman
Rights | Copyright American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Item Type | Quantitative Data
Cite This document | Herbert Gutman, “Table of Naming Practices among the Bennehan-Cameron Plantation Slaves, Orange County, North Carolina, 1778–1842,” SHEC: Resources for Teachers, accessed March 19, 2024, https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1631.

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