They Had Names: Representations of the Enslaved in Liberty County, Georgia, Estate Inventories, 1762-1865

\"They Had Names\" contains abstracts of 650 Liberty County post-mortem estate inventories and divisions. The names of 18,300+ enslaved people were extracted from Liberty County court documents recorded between 1762 and 1865. The dataset includes original and standardized versions of names of the enslaved and slave owners, allowing for sorting by name. The abstracts contain all names, dates, and identifying information contained in the documents, but omit all non-human property. To enable sorting of the spreadsheet by name, but preserve the ability to discover family groupings, a column was added for the original order within the inventory, allowing a user to discover a name, then sort the spreadsheet by slave owner, date, and order within original inventory to discover possible family groupings. The estate inventories have been digitized and are freely available online at FamilySearch.org and the Georgia Archives Virtual Vault, but lack of indexing and inconsistencies in spelling of names have complicated their use; this dataset is designed to fill that gap.