Talk:William Brent Jr.

more work needed
The Brent family of Stafford county, Virginia included many men named William, and I could not easily distinguish this man from his uncle who died in the same year. Clearly, he's not the William Brent who hobnobbed with George Washington and George Mason and served five times in the House of Delegates although as a Catholic he could've been ruled ineligible (and his wikipedia article hasn't been written). The problem is that both these men (who were born rather than died in the Revolutionary era) probably owned land in Washington, D.C., this man's father establishing the Brentwood estate before dying in 1819. Perhaps unwisely, I've noted the 1820 and 1830 census problems in the footnote itself. In the 1840 census, slaves were owned by only one William Brent in Washington, D.C., and ancestry.com did not find any slaves owned by any William Brent in Stafford County. Of course, this could be a digitizing/indexing error, or this man may have provided dowries for daughters or suffered financial reverses which led him to seek the diplomatic position. While Brents remained in Stafford County, Brentville became part of Prince William County well before the birth of either man, and several slaveholding Brents lived in adjacent Virginia counties. Both these man having died in 1848, I'm don't know where the possibly former Virginian died, but I'm pretty sure he's not the Stafford County slaveholder in the 1850 census.Jweaver28 (talk) 19:39, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Category:American slave owners
No mention of slave-owning. I feel that this category should be restricted to people whose slave-owning history was notable in itself. Valetude (talk) 04:18, 22 April 2021 (UTC)