Free Persons of Color in Mecklenburg County NC

Finding documented Free Persons of Color (FPOC) in Mecklenburg County records can be tedious and I wanted to make it a little easier to find these individuals. The spreadsheet below contains individuals where documentation indicates they were free in the Minutes of the Court of Common Pleas and Quarter Sessions.

Though there isn’t clarity on the subject, persons of color who were bound (apprenticed) were likely to have been free. This particular source shows that, among others, children of free persons of color and free baseborn children of color (illegitimate children of color) were eligible for apprenticeship. With that in mind, I have compiled a complete list of all individuals apprenticed, as recorded in the Minutes of the Court of Common Pleas and Quarter Sessions, regardless of whether their status as free or enslaved was explicitly indicated. In some cases, you can find these individuals listed in a 1850 or 1860 census which recorded all free inhabitants of a place. This adds to the belief that they were indeed free persons of color.