Welcome to Lowcountry Africana, sponsored by the Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Charleston, South Carolina! The Magnolia Plantation Foundation has sponsored genealogical research to reconstruct the lineages of enslaved communities in the United States and Barbados.

     For the past year, researchers from the University of South Florida Africana Heritage Project and known descendants of families formerly enslaved on Drayton family plantations have worked together to rediscover the scattered paper trail which may connect enslaved ancestors on Drayton family plantations with many thousands of living descendants today.

 

Initial research has focused upon documenting the lineages of known descendants and gathering documents from, and about, known Drayton family plantations. 

 

The Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Charleston, South Carolina has sponsored this groundbreaking research to reconstruct the family lineages of enslaved communities on Drayton family plantations, and sponsored this website to keep the legacy growing.

 

With the kind assistance of Drayton Hall Plantation and the National Trust for Historic Preservation (curators of the Drayton family plantation journals), the research team has gathered more than 10,000 pages of documentary evidence and extracted more than 1,600 names from those documents. Read More...