The problem is that prior to the end of the Civil War in 1865, the majority of African American people in the United States where slaves, although those who were free will be found in the regular census records. However, those people who were slaves prior to 1865 are really hard to find. You have to be very careful in your research and you have to spend lot more time with source records and use your imagination sometimes. On the other hand, slaves were property and because they were property, there were bills of sales for them and they are recorded in the land records, in the deed books, in the courthouse. Hopefully as you move from your current self to your father to your grandmother and grandfather they will have heard stories from their parents. One of the ways that the black community held onto their identity was through oral stories. During the 1940s the WPA did oral interviews with ex-slaves and those oral interviews have been transcribed and can be found at the National Archive site, (http://www.nara.gov). The next place to go is the Freedmen records. These are records that were done as the freed slaves were signed up to vote, to have bank accounts or to be represented by attorneys. A majority of those records are now online at (http://freedmensbureau.com). There are also slave censuses for 1840, 1850 and 1860. They don't list the names of the slaves, but they list the slave owner's name and an approximate location and the number of slaves within that household. If you can trace your ancestors back to an area where the majority of the land owners were not large slave owners, then you can take the slaveholder's name and do some checking at the courthouses, which might lead you to bill of sales within the land records, or the slaveholder's will which will list slaves by their first names. In addition, there are a tremendous number of plantation records that still exist and large slave owners kept meticulous records of birth, death, who was father of who, all kinds of things and many of those plantation records are available.
