ABSTRACT
To enter the everyday material world of antebellum black Bostonians, the archives in the Suffolk County Courthouse were searched to locate probate records for known members of the Afro-American community in Boston before the Civil War. The pool of documents thus assembled makes no pretense about its inherent limitations. It is representative neither of all blacks who died nor of the entire living black population in antebellum Boston; its three sources are each clearly biased toward the more mature, stable, and affluent members of the Afro-American community. The human interactions that can be linked to a decedent through probate records provide valuable clues to mapping out the structure of the black community’s network in Boston. The process of the multi-angled inquiry has made abundantly clear how intricate a source even a single packet of probate records for one decedent can be when allowed to speak.
