Aren't these family trees suspiciously neat?

I've drawn up a lot of family trees for the people who John Tharp enslaved, and I realise that they might look too good to be true.

On the smaller estates, there were fewer people with the same name and reconstructing  family trees is reasonably straightforward. Enslaved people were tied to the land they worked in a far more real sense than agricultural labourers in England. Despite the high death rates, these were stable communities and the Tharp estates were being managed by trustees in this period, who had little incentive to spend money on increasing productivity by buying more enslaved people.

But the family trees aren't all straightforward by any means, and I promise that I'm being upfront about the complications wherever I've found them. I've broken up family trees into digestible chunks, but if you follow the links up or down a generation, you'll soon appreciate how tangled they can become.


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