Where can one go to find their true African name?

Question

The slaves were given their owners names, I am looking for a way to figure out what these peoples real name might have been before the owner got them and trace that back? I am looking for the proper or real name of the ancestors of the Kendrick slave descendants from Monticello Kentucky, can anyone help me with this? I am doing this for purposes of genealogy. Thanks ahead of time for all the answer that I will hopefully get. Has anyone else thought about this as an issue and what did you feel or do about it?

Answer 1

Good luck with your quest.
I can't say for certain, but i doubt you'll have much success.
As far as i know, the africans that were brought to the US as slaves were treated little better than cattle when they were transported. It's unlikely their original african names were documented by anybody involved in the slave trade. So finding out what their names were is going to be a tough, if not impossible task.
DNA profiling may be able to provide some insight into which part of africa a person may have hailed from, but that's probably about as good as it gets.

Answer 2

Most Africans at the time didn't have surnames. They used "A, son of B", whose father would be "B, son of C" and whose son would be "D, son of A". Some Africans and many Muslims in the rest of the world still use that pattern. The Swedes did too, until the middle 1800's.

Most slave owners slapped Christian names on their slaves as soon as they could. It was illegal for a slave to learn to read or write (for fear they would forge manumission papers), so most of the true names are lost in the mists of time.

People doing African-American genealogy strike out about 99% of the time. Your best hope is that someone gives "My ***** boy, Moses" to his son in his will, and his son gives "my ***** man, Moses" to HIS son 20 years later, and you find a 70-year old African-American named Moses with the last name of his former owners living in the county in 1870, the fist year the census counted A-A's by name.

Some owners listed their slaves in family bibles. Most didn't. The Freedman's bank records are a treasue trove, but they don't go back to the A-A roots.

There are forums devoted to African-American genealogy research.