Allum,
If you did not find your ancestor as a free person in 1860, then he was not emancipated prior to the end of slavery, after the Civil War. The key to determining if a person was free during slavery times, which ended in 1865 with the end of the Civil War after the Emancipation Proclamation where all slaves were set free, is finding your ancestor in the census in 1860 and before that. Anyone who was not free before the end of slavery would only be able to be found by researching the records of their slaveowners, and those are the records that you need to start with, especially since you believe you know who their owners were.

Deloris