Family Search.org

[GeoWilliam750]

14. One more vote for caution about what you find on the web

People simply copy and re-submit unverified rubbish so that the same mistakes come up again and again. There are so many mistakes floating around out there, that it raises my blood pressure significantly. It is highly annoying.

If your family has mostly been here since the time of the American Revolution, it is statistically almost impossible to be free from the taint of your ancestors having been slaveholders. Amongst some families there are slaveholders, people who freed their slaves, people in the Underground Railway, and people in the reverse underground railway (kidnapping free blacks and selling them into slavery). Reading the records of slave-owning is highly nauseating, and if you want to have your eyes opened, go down to some of the Eastern Kentucky County courthouses, and go through the deeds and manumission records.

Disgusting - and occasionally refreshingly uplifting.

However, those people are not you, and you did not know them, nor approve of what they did. You do not bear the sins of your parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents however many generations back, even though to some degree you may be alive today because those ancestors directly benefited from the evil of slavery.