Hdoc: Finding Judith

Honor Sachs, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder, is a historian of early America whose research focuses on slavery, law, and family. She is currently writing a multigenerational history of an enslaved family that sued for freedom claiming Indigenous ancestry. 

Currently titled, The Book of Judith: A Story of Law, Family, and Mixed-Race Ancestry in Slavery and Freedom, the book reconstructs the legal and personal stories of a family that claimed descent from an Apalachee woman taken captive in Florida and trafficked to South Carolina and Virginia. Generations of this family sued for freedom in jurisdictions throughout Virginia, Kentucky Tennessee, and Mississippi, cultivating their legal strategies and sharing genealogical knowledge through family and community networks across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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