I just finished reading Elizabeth Regosin, Freedom’s Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation (University of Virginia Press, 2001). This book offers a new perspective on some of the conditions that shaped slaves’ families and how ex-slaves re-patterned their families to adapt to altered conditions after Emancipation.

Thanx David. I am motivated to put this on my "must read" list.