The Descendant Survey
The first research session (December 2025) set a single objective: take the names of the enslaved from the John W. Guion probate and the earlier Guion records, and find them again in the census records of freedom — documenting their survival, their households, and their adoption of the Guion (and Guyon) surname. The matches below are graded by confidence in the ledger; several — the elders Edward and Frank, the blind laborer Moses Guyon — carry the distinctive ages and given names of the 1842 inventory across the emancipation divide.
Data (CSV)
Session I · December 2025
The Ledger of Named Individuals
The working ledger of every named person recovered from the Guion records — name, age, valuation, kinship, source, and proposed 1870 identity with a confidence grade. The survey's master index.
The reappearance of distinctive names — Cicero, Watts, Scipio, Sam Spotts — in Reconstruction-era
sources strengthens the likelihood that many survived to freedom. Each name is a starting point for cohabitation records,
Freedmen's Bureau labor contracts, and Freedman's Bank registers, where parents are sometimes named outright.