I and many others wrote last week about Ben Affleck and his ancestor’s slaves. Now comes an article posted on The Daily Beast website that points out that Affleck’s ancestor may not have owned slaves at all. Following is a teaser.
But new research conducted by The Daily Beast and Georgia genealogist Barbara Stock suggests that Benjamin L. Cole—Affleck’s great-great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side—was hardly the wealthy Southern plantation owner that Finding Your Roots claimed, and that the small-town Georgia sheriff may not have owned slaves at all.
Using Georgia tax digests from Chatham County and Savannah — which give an annual account of wealth, including slave ownership—in conjunction with the census, which took a count only once a decade, Stock found evidence that while Affleck’s ancestor was the executor of estates that included slaves, he owned none himself.
