David,

Thank you for pointing us toward such an excellent resource. Even if the State of Georgia isn't one's primary area of research this resource certainly gives us an insight into the legalities of slave ownership and the movement (migration) of those slave properties.

Art Thomas

Book Review
Dawn Watson, Slave Importation Affidavit Registers for Nine Georgia Counties, 1818-1847 (Clayton, GA: Bone Diggers Press, 2012). 114 pages, 3 ill.

Dawn Watson has published an important book of extracts, Slave Importation Affidavit Registers for Nine Georgia Counties, 1818-1847. If any Georgia records could cry out for priority attention these would have been among the loudest, and this book does a fine job making the content easily available to the public.

These records are important for genealogy and history research because they document migration of specific people, because they list the enslaved during the lifetimes of the slave owners (we don’t have to wait for probate), and because they often include details like ages, occupations, kinships, and physical descriptions. Watson’s book extracts records related to about 950 slaves, a small number of the hundreds of thousands living in Georgia, but a significant addition to our libraries because it is so difficult to catch the ancestors on the road—to learn where they may have come from and when they migrated.