I have decided to "liveblog" my workday for no particular reason. You can mute "#drcworkday to avoid these posts & still see news boosts, etc.
We're starting out w/an article on #BeneficiaryDesignations that convinces me I haven't had enough caffeine.
Basically, the way BDs work is: You go to all your accounts that can be readily transferred outside of a #LastWillAndTestament & you name somebody to automatically get their contents when you die. Handy.
#TIL the "value" of the slaves one of my relatives "owned" back in 1857 and now I'm sick to my stomach. 
(I was looking over some of my family's ancestry docs. It's one thing to know your family tree includes slave owners, which I already did. It's quite another to discover some of the nuance of what that actually meant.)
#Ancestry #Genealogy #Slaves #Slave #Race #Black #BlackAndWhite #LastWillAndTestament #CivilWar #Valuation #Value #Property #Freedom
https://archive.org/details/dc-wills
Index to District of Columbia Wills, 1801-1920 by Dorothy S. Provine
Topics
#DC, #WashingtonDC, #districtofcolombia, #unitedstatesofamerika, #slaveowners, #blackchattelslavery, #wills, #will, #willandtestament, #lastwillandtestament, #propertyownership, #propertytransfers, #wealth, #intergenerationalwealth, #upperclasses
from the introduction: "This book consists of an alphabetical name listing of more than 22,700 wills filed in the District of Colombia Orphans' Court (Probate Court) during the period 1801-1920. [...] The vast bulk of the wills, of course, were created by the local middle and upper class property owners to ensure that the distribution of their possessions was carried out according to their wishes."
