This is a “reprint” of a post to my Facebook Group from 17 Mar 2023, before I reactivated my blogging capabilities. Hoe it is useful to site visitors.

“Race” is a tricky thing — and it often is in the eye of the beholder. As I review records online I frequently see “W” or “Black/African-American” as if such categorizations are absolute. But the story is almost never so simple.
For that reason, in the past I have resisted creating a fact type called “Race”, because things quickly get murky with lots of Appalachian ancestors (think “Melungeon”). However, I do want to provide resources that will help Appalachian researchers of all backgrounds and racial identifications to learn more about their past.
With my latest database update (Mar 2023) I am introducing my best attempt at a non-biased compromise solution. It won’t be perfect, but it is an effort that reveals how people saw and described themselves over time and place, as well as how keepers of public records viewed these same individuals.
In the screenshot below you will note a new fact labeled “Non-white/Multiracial. It will include a date or period of time during which the individual was identified as non-white (black, negro, colored, mulatto, etc.), and a reference to the type of public record(s) involved (birth, death, marriage, census, burial). For census entries there will also be a note of the literal racial descriptor used in that record.
The specific record in this screenshot goes further. While the person is tagged as non-white/multiracial, census records classed him as mulatto in one decade and white in another. This ambiguity was not that uncommon. In such cases, I will add a note to the fact to highlight the contradictions over time.
I am currently reviewing my existing records to add this nomenclature whenever I have public records tagged with “race”. There will be two potential sources of controversy here… First, there is no way I can go back to every “Census” fact and add “white” to each census entry, because it would require review of two-hundred-thousand+ entries — but failure to do so should not be viewed as some pejorative label I am arbitrarily applying to a few individuals. Second, some users may become upset that I tag one of their “lily-white” ancestors as non-white; it will not be based on my discretion but rather on what a public record at a particular time showed.
I really hope this will be of use to folks who welcome a better understanding of the life stories of all their Appalachian forebears.