Genealogy Forum UK

I am now working on the US ancestors. One of my ancestors Nathaniel Jackson, emigrated to the USA in the early 20c to marry someone called Henriette Baum from Louisiana. I have looked her up and found out that she was the daughter of Fletcher Bahm who was in turn the son of Rene Valcour Bahm from Louisiana. It is not clear if they were Creoles or Cajuns and the name spelling varies enormously. But what I have found is that Rene Bahm married Margaret Bailey and Pierre Hypolite Bahm married Brunett Bailey. Both were the daughters of John Bailey and Clarissa Joiner. All the families lived in Tangiphoa from the early 19c.

The early US censuses included skin colour - although in Alabama and Louisiana before the Louisiana purchase being of mixed race did not mean you were a slave, as Louisiana was under French rule and did things differently. Mixed raced was recorded as Mu for Mulatto as opposed to White or Black. Mulattos could be free citizens and own land etc. Some even owned slaves themselves

In the 1880 census John Bailey and Clairissa Joiner are recorded as being white, so are Margaret Bailey (daughter) and her husband Rene Bahm and their children. In the same census Hypolite Bahm and Brunett Bailey (daughter) and their children Ella and Robert, are recorded as mulattos. I have looked at the original census document and it is quite specific, not a transposition error. Yet there is a photo of Ella Bahm on the ancestry site of a descendent and she looks to be white. Of course that does not prove she was not of black extraction somewhere along the line as the skin colours were quite varied in La back then due to intermarriage. Ella's children are recorded as white.

I am puzzling over this. I have contacted the creator of the ancestry site with the photo of Ella but they have not replied. Anyone got any ancestors in Louisiana back in the early 19c and care to comment?

It was at the discretion of the person taking the census. There was no colour chart for them to determine the level of "black/white".

If they designated mullatto in the same house their parents were designated white then there would be a mystery.

I heard that a good suntan would get a mullatto rating with some census takers....

Thanks for that. It does seem as though skin colour merely depended on the perception of the census taker and this seems to have been known to be unreliable in some areas. After all a dark olive Mediterranean skin may well be darker than that of a person of mixed race. I stood next to Halle Berry at the airport not long ago and she was much lighter skinned than many Italians I know.

Tracing ancestors in Louisiana seems particularly fraught as there are so many Creole families of European extraction, of mixed race, alongside Cajuns from Canada, alongside African American slaves, alongside Native Americans and of course lots of intermarriage as there were plenty of free people of colour in Louisiana before the purchase.

In the case of my ancestors, I have found a census return with three families all with the same surname as my ancestor living next to each other, and preusmably related, classified as white, mulatto and black respectively. I suspect there are some freed slaves in my ancestors household way back, and maybe even some illegitimate children by slaves way back. The situation is further complicated by some former slaves taking on the surname of the plantation owner. I imagine this is how the male line in the Jackson Five, got their name originally.

I am trying to find a genealogist in the relevant area of Louisiana to do so research for me, but I believe in some states the birth certificates and death certificate records are sealed so copies are not available and Louisiana may be one of these.