Peace Omowalejabali and Houserunner..
Really interesting thread. I found an interesting reference on Google books about the term GRIF. It's from the book "Africans In Colonial Louisiana, the development of Afro-Creole culture in the 18th century".
It says on Page 262,
"The Pointe Coupee documents distinguish four racial categories among people of African descent: negre, mulatre, grif and quarteron. Negre meant entirely black; mulatre meant half white and half black; grif meant mixture of black and indian; quarteron meant three quarters white and one-quarter black. The use of the term grif reflects legal concerns as well as problems of definition. A significant number of creole slaves, especially the first generation, had Indian mothers. Slaves who were descendants of Indians were rarely acknowledged as such in the lists of slaves, for a practical reason: Indian slavery was prohibited under Spanish law, and therefore, slaves descended from Indian women were legally entitled to their freedom. One can safely concluded that those slaves listend in the Pointe Coupee inventories as grif were on a fraction of the slaves who were mixtures of blacks and Indians. by the early 1790's, grif slaves disappeared entirely from the Pointe Coupee lists and mulatto slaves increased, indicating a redefinition to prevent slaves descended from Indian Mothers from claiming their freedom under Spanish law."
http://books.google.co.jp/books?id=Arybfb4UWtwC&pg=PA262&lpg=PA262&dq=GRIF Slavery term&source=bl&ots=EhlpvGv2pI&sig=zZtVtvAb43ScdQ5xl7bBrEvc_tg&hl=ja&sa=X&ei=5Vl4T5xnjOOYBfHV8OkP&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAA
..and that same search netted a connection between Louisiana and the Congo.
During this period [SPANISH PERIOD (1764-1803)], the cultural composition of Louisianians became more complex. For starters, the Spanish Crown sought slaves who were not Muslims, which accounted for a massively Congo presence within the local slave population. The Congos were from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Congo. Historian Gwendolyn Midlo-Hall noted in a radio interview that during this period, many of the slave households consisted of Wolof wives and Congo husbands, which I have substantiated in extant civil and parochial records.
http://christophelandry.com/2011/02/04/louisiana-myths-quadroons-octoroons/
Thank you brother as you have not only confirmed my own findings but you have also narrowed the field so to say. My Dad traced his own ancestry, or he claimed descent from Senegal and I know this had to mean Wolof or Bambara. The Wolof and Congolese mixture sounds more exact. My point though is that if we take that time period up to about 1803, due to migration into Louisiana as a result of the Haitian revolution, there was an influx of "Indians" of East Indian origin who, along with Africans from Cuba, Martinique, Guadalupe, Jamaica,etc, "free blacks" so to say, that changed the balance so much that it makes it nearly impossible to determine a single African lineage due to the long history of miscegenation between all groups.