James W. Hagy

People and Professions of Charleston, South Carolina, 1782-1803 James W. Hagy

This publication affords us as close a glimpse of the population of Charleston, South Carolina during the last quarter of the eighteenth century as we are likely to come by. Professor Hagy has compiled all the names and other pertinent genealogical information which can be found in the Charleston city directories of 1782, 1785, 1790, 1794, 1796, 1801, and 1802 and in the federal censuses for Charleston for 1790 and 1800. In assembling his data, the author has chosen to respect the integrity of his sources, thus the contents of each directory or census are arranged in a separate alphabetical sequence, preceded by a brief commentary concerning the methods used by the original compilers in producing the directory or census in question. In the case of the city directories, the names of inhabitants are followed by their occupations and addresses; for the censuses of 1790 and 1800, only the names of the heads of household appear. Since a given individual may appear/disappear in as many as nine different listings spanning a twenty-year period, the People and Professions of Charleston affords genealogists the rare opportunity of tracing the mobility or migration of a given ancestor at very close range. While this work cannot claim to include every resident of Charleston for the period under investigation, it nonetheless identifies over 13,000 persons who lived and/or worked there between 1782 and 1802.