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Paul Heinegg

Paul Heinegg has worked as an engineer for the past thirty years overseas in Tanzania, Liberia, and Saudi Arabia. He became interested in the history of the free African American community while researching his wife's ancestors from Northampton County, North Carolina. They descended from a community of African Americans who had been free in Virginia since the colonial period. They owned land and appeared to have been on good terms with their white neighbors.

Intrigued by what he found, Paul researched the family histories of most free African American families in North Carolina and Virginia during the colonial period and published Free African Americans of North Carolina and Virginia, which received an award from the North Carolina Genealogical Society in 1992 and the American Society of Genealogists in 1994.
Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware will be published later this year. Both books can be read on-line at: http://freeafricanamericans.com. The site also contains abstracts of the colonial court records, the 1790-1810 census, and colonial tax lists.