As you recall from yesterday's post, my dear friend Sameerah asked me to help her with her family tree. So I told her what information I needed from her , which she gave to me, and I dug in.
As i explored the branches of her family tree, I became more interested in one particular line, on her maternal side. It was the most fascinating to me. The reason being, because she had a connection to North Carolina.
African American genealogy is generally difficult to do because we run into slavery. Before the 1870 census, African Americans were not counted by name. Another problem is once freed from slavery, African Americans had to choose a last name (surname). In my research I have seen surnames changed once or twice before settling on a surname.
This is what I noticed with this branch of her maternal line. Family members even spelled the name differently, but it is the same family. Also, other freed slaves from the area also took the last name as their surname.
Where did the surnames come from, you may ask? That's complicated. There were many reasons that African Americans chose the last names they did. One of the most popular last names was Freeman or Freedman, which is pretty self explanatory after the Emancipation.
In Sameerah's family, her great great grandmother had the last name of her former enslaver; Ireland. She had this name in 1870 and 1880. However, in 1900 her last name was Pickett. In official documents the descendants later have spelling variations of Picket, Pickette, Pigott, Piggot or Piggott.
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