The title of our series was inspired from our personal experience researching at the Bossier Parish Clerk's Office. We found that many of the pages within these massive deed books were blank, with but a brief caption in the center of the page which read "No land transferred in this instrument, only slaves." That was it. A huge page about 2 foot by 1 foot with a single sentence in the center and the names of the transacting parties on the top corner. We were stunned to think that when these records were transcribed into the books, the land was deemed valuable enough to merit meticulous transferance to each page, but the slaves did not. With this heart-rending thought, we chose to make a book dedicated to the deeds of the Slaves themselves and not the land.
In this way, our books are a different way to look at deeds.
Volume 1 of series, "No Land Only Slaves!", was taken from the Deeds of Conveyance Records of Bossier Parish, Louisiana.
The format:
This book was originally intended for family research purposes and we felt that lots of white space was essential for taking notes, thus we have allowed for wide margins. Volume 1 is divided into 6 chapters which correspond to the Deeds of Conveyance books located in the County Clerks office in Bossier Parish.
The book includes a case study to aid the researcher and 2 indexes, a slaveholders index and a slave name index.
It is our hope that these 3,261 people, once known only as slaves, will be remembered by their names.