The Wilsons (sometimes spelled Willson) were a large extended mixed-race family in the area around Sudlersville, Queen Anne’s County. Their roots as free people there stretched back into the late 1600s. Many of their descendants still live in Kent and Queen Anne’s Counties today.

This list of names is an inventory of purchases at an estate sale, dating probably from around 1815. The free man of color whose name is on the first line, Sherry Wilson, purchased items that included green-edged plates (a type imported from England), a new counterpane, and a tablecloth — indicating that his family enjoyed some degree of material comfort. The Commodore Collection includes numerous documents that depict free African Americans doing business with their white neighbors.

Wilson’s freedom was far from secure, however. In 1839, he was caught reading an abolitionist book aloud to two African American women. Wilson — then about 60 years old — was convicted and imprisoned under a state law that prohibited any Marylander from circulating such “inflammatory” antislavery publications. Thrown into solitary confinement in the Maryland Penitentiary, he was not pardoned and set free until 1848.

Sherry Wilson’s race is not mentioned in this document, but is known from other sources. No doubt there are other free people of color mentioned in the recently discovered documents without any racial identifiers. Further research can bring more of them to light.

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