 Welcome to the Heritage Exchange video series hosted by Wikitree's US Black Heritage Project. Video number 3 – How to Create Profiles for Enslaved Ancestors In this video, you will learn the Heritage Exchange system for creating profiles for enslaved ancestors who have at least a known first name based on the documents you have available. Please see the video on documenting unnamed enslaved ancestors for what to do when you only have a list of slaves with only the age and gender known, such as on a slave schedule. Please note that most profiles for enslaved ancestors will have a great deal of placeholder information and the profiles will initially be used as workspaces to collect additional information. At the beginning, we will have more questions than answers in most cases, but as more information is found and verified, the placeholder information will be replaced with the more accurate and permanent information about the person. Here is what you must have available before you can create a profile for an enslaved ancestor. A source, naming the enslaved ancestor. The ancestor should be named by at least first name in this source. And finally, you will need either a date or approximate date of the source or the age or approximate age of the ancestor. Today we are going to go back to the profile for slave owner Daniel English from the previous video and create profiles for the six slaves listed by first name in his will. Here are the six people who were named in the 1853 will for Daniel English. Today I'm going to create a profile for Hampton first because I have some unique information about him. For step-by-step directions on how to create profiles on WikiTree, please see the video called How to Create Profiles. In a new tab, I will go to the Add plus section of the menu and choose New Person in the dropdown. This will give me the new person creation form. Because all I know for certain is Hampton's first name and that he was a boy, all the other information I would need to create his profile today is going to be estimated. I'll type his first name in the first name field and although it was spelled H-A-M-T-O-N on the will, on another page his name was listed as Hamp. So I'm going to assume it should be spelled as H-A-M-P-T-O-N. For the last name I am going to use the placeholder English from his only known slave owner at the time. This is only until a documented last name can be found or until we can connect Hampton to his descendants and discover the last name they chose to use following emancipation. If you have not read the WikiTree naming conventions for slaves help page, please do so before you create any profiles for enslaved ancestors. It is very important that you understand the system of using a useful placeholder last name at birth and when to change the last name and what to change it to when more information becomes available. I don't have an exact age for Hampton, but the will states he is a boy. Because he's valued so highly at $1,000, I doubt he's a young boy. He's more likely a teenager, maybe about 15 or 16 years old. Normally we would use the date of the document for the birth date which in this case is 13 December 1853. This was the date the will was written although it didn't go into probate until 1863. That means what we know about Hampton was written on this December 13, 1853 date. In most cases, I would just use this exact date of the document and mark it as before. However, because I can estimate he was a teenager I'm going to go ahead and subtract 15 years from the year and use an estimated date of 1838. The best time to use estimated dates like I just did with Hampton is when you have a known parent-child relationship. In this case, please subtract a reasonable amount of adult years from the date of the document for the parent. However, please don't spend too much time on trying to estimate dates like this. If it is easier you can always just use the exact date of the document you're using and mark it as before that date. The Heritage Exchange team will check the profile to see if any dates need to be adjusted. Please always leave the death date field blank unless you have a documented date of death. I'm going to mark him as male and certain. Again, I don't know for certain where Hampton was born but I'm going to estimate South Carolina which is the location of the will and slave schedule. Please always put an estimated location in the birth location field to help prevent duplicates. Finally, I'm going to put a source in the source box which is required. I'm going to go to Daniel's profile and simply copy the source that I put on his profile and paste it here. Now click the Add New Person button. Now we need to edit the profile to add a few additional items. Click the Edit tab. Click Uncertain for the birth location. We already have the date clicked as before. Then scroll down to the category picker which is this button that looks like stairs. And I'm going to put in the top level Heritage Exchange category. Simply type in Heritage Exchange and you'll see it's the very first one at the top. Click on it and it will place it directly where it goes in the biography. This category will signal to the US Black Heritage Project's Heritage Exchange team that a new profile has been created and it needs to be checked for any additional categories and proper formatting. The second category that needs to be added is the slaves by county category. Because I know that Hampton was enslaved in Abbaville County, South Carolina, I will type that into the category picker and add the word slaves. I see it already popped up in this case so I can click on it and it will go exactly where it should be in the profile. Next I'm going to add a template above the biography heading that tells people we are currently using a temporary placeholder last name. In most cases it will be the last name of the known slave owner. The code for this template is S-L-A-V-E space L-N-A-V in double curly brackets. When you click on the preview button you will see the banner at the top that tells people this is a placeholder last name until a surname can be determined and we ask people not to merge or change the last name without talking to the US Black Heritage Project first. Once a documented last name has been found or Hampton has been connected to his descendants and we know the last name that they chose to use after emancipation, then this template can be removed. Please do not use this template on profiles for people who are enslaved that you have a documented last name for. For instance if you find Hampton listed in the 1870 and 18 census with the last name of Mills, his last name at birth would be Mills. This was the last name he chose to go by. Do not wait for a document during the time of enslavement to confirm a last name at birth. This kind of documentation rarely exists. Again please see the help page called Naming Conventions for Slaves for more information. Next Hampton should have the African American sticker. It needs to be typed exactly like that and if I click the preview you will see that the sticker has been properly added. I'll next update the automatically written biography to be more accurate. Right now it just says Hampton was born before 1838. I have added that we have estimated that Hampton was born before 1838 which is 15 years before the will of his slave owner Daniel English. I'm also going to add that in that will, I'm going to put in that will dated 13 December 1853 he was valued at $1,000. Again this information about their value could be helpful to tell us more about Hampton's life. I will also add that his birth location has been estimated. Try to put as much information as you know about Hampton and what information you have estimated in the biography so other researchers will know. Next I'm going to add a couple spaces and create a slave owner's heading. This is a sub heading so it should have three equal signs. This section is important for two reasons. One it will link Hampton to Daniel English and others that were enslaved by Daniel English. Those other people could very well be Hampton's relatives. Second it was very common for slaves to be sold or inherited more than once during their lifetime. Each time they were moved to another location was an opportunity to be in contact with additional people who may also be relatives. It's important to link Hampton to all of them. If there are other people who may have featured in Hampton's life such as a plantation overseer or someone who rented his labor you could also list and link those people here. I will first add a wiki link to the profile for Daniel English. I can do that by going to his profile and choosing the copy wiki link button and pasting it here. I'm going to choose to use an asterisk so I'll have a bullet point. If you recall from the previous video on how to create a slave owner profile I found an interesting note about Hampton on page 60 of the probate file. It stated that Hampton had been hired by James Callison for the sum of $110 in 1859. Since he was enslaved Hampton was not actually hired but rented by James Callison from Daniel English. Daniel English would be the one who received the payment. I did a little bit of research to find out if I could discover who James Callison was and I did find that information and I created a profile for him. I can now add him to the section of slave owners and even though he didn't actually own Hampton he had Hampton in his possession for a time. So I'm going to click paste and then I'm going to add a note that he rented Hampton from Daniel English in 1859. I'm also going to update the source that I added because I originally said C page 58 and we know that Hampton is also listed on page 60. So I'm going to add a note about that. I'm going to click save on that and next I'm going to go to James Callison's profile. James Callison was born in 1830 in Ireland. Because we're going to treat this the same as a slave owner profile I'm going to create the slaves heading and I'm going to link the profile for Hampton with a note that he rented Hampton. I'm also going to go to Daniel English's profile and I'm going to grab that probate source, copy and paste that down at the bottom. Except I'm going to change this to C page 60 because that is the page that mentions James Callison renting Hampton for $110. Again because we are treating James Callison in a similar manner as a slave owner we need to add the county category for slave owners. Interestingly although Hampton was a slave in Abbaville County James Callison lived in Edgefield County so that's going to be the category I'm going to add. And there it pops up for me so I just click on that and it automatically adds it to the profile. Now we have everything that we need. We've got the county category. We have the linked profile for Hampton with a note regarding the rental relationship and we have the source down at the bottom that proves that we know this information. So I'm going to click some things that says what I did to this profile and click save. Now because we just discovered that Hampton was also in an enslavement relationship in Edgefield County as well as Abbaville County we need to go back to Hampton's profile. And we're going to add a second category. This one for Edgefield County. Click that. It puts it right there in the profile. And we're going to click categorization and save. It's important to make sure we have a category for every county that the slave owner or the people who were enslaved lived or worked in. It's very common for people who were enslaved to be passed on from one person to another which could mean they moved to another state or another county. And we want to make sure to record every single one of those instances and every single one of those slavery relationships. Before finishing there's one very important step that I need to take. I have linked Daniel English and James Callison on the profile for Hampton English but I need to link in the opposite direction. So I'm going to click on the Wiki ID link button for Hampton English. And I'm first going to go to Daniel's profile. And I'm going to replace the name here for Hampton with the Wiki link for his profile. Do not put the placeholder last name in the name here because he wasn't listed with the last name English on the document. Only use the first name. In fact I'm going to spell it exactly as it was in the will. And when you click the preview button you will see we now have Hampton linked to his profile. I'll put in a change explanation and click save. One final item, let's look at the category that we added to Hampton's profile which was the Abbaville County, South Carolina slaves category. When we click on this you will see we have now grouped Hampton with all the other people who were also enslaved in Abbaville County, South Carolina. This could be helpful because Hampton may be related to some of these people. Now Hampton's basic profile is complete and he is ready for additional information to be added as soon as it's discovered. The goal of the U.S. Black Heritage Heritage Exchange Program is to connect Hampton to his descendants so that will be the next step. Thank you so much for helping connect enslaved ancestors to their descendants by creating their profiles from documents. These don't have to be documents from only your own ancestors. You can help the Heritage Exchange Program by creating profiles from any documents you come across.