Many slaves did not know their own age. A slave's age who was captured in Africa did not know their year of birth because no record was kept. The slave owner who originally purchased a slave at auction from the slave ship, at best, was someone's guess as to the slave's age.

The age of a slave is therefore basically conjecture. The age assigned at a slave auction was usually passed down from slave owner to slave owner. When a slave was born to a female slave on a plantation, the salve's mother usually was illiterate and sometime the plantation owner did not make a lasting record of the salves birth.

I don't believe the early census taker actually spoke with any slave while taking a census but relied on the slave owner's spokesman to obtain a slave's age.The records of slave's owner also should taken with a grain of salt. Salve dealers often misstated a slave's at a slave auction especially on slaves who looked as if they were above the age of thirty-thirty five; the auctioneer often reported the age as 10-15 years younger than his records may have shown. Plantation owners certainly did not want to purchase a slave that would soon be unable to work after a few years of hard labor on a plantation.

As a researchers, we should all be extra careful of accepting the recorded age of any individual appearing on public records dated prior to 1800. I have found ages of individuals (white) being misstated as much as five to to 15 years on official census reports. Some of the census takers penmanship was atrocious and sometimes numbers are questionable because of poor penmanship.