Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in America and as I sat down at my computer to work on family history, I was reminded by a simple column in a birth registry how far we have come.
Under a birth record for Kentucky in 1856, I was looking into an alternate spelling of a name for my great, great grandfather Napoleon who would have been born in this time frame. As I scanned across the columns looking for father's name, I came across a column that make me stop dead in my search. The column read, "Name of Father or Owner of Child." Owner of child....can any of us really, truly imagine living in a time where a man had no right to be named as the father of this own child? Instead, he was forced to concede that his child was just another piece of property to be bought and sold by a man he had to call master. HIS own child! Here was a world where it was nothing for a man with slaves to record the name of a child in a birth record and list himself as the owner of that child.
I am humbled today knowing that for this time, such a column and recording of such data was normal practice and there was nothing strange about it. It was common place.
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