Names and stories of more than 4,500 Georgians who were enslaved can now be discovered by future generations as part of a University of Georgia Libraries project to discover, digitize, and describe pre-Civil War archival materials.
Archivists and students at UGA’s Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library recently completed the “Finding Their Names” project, supported by a $137,000 National Historical Publications and Records Commission grant to center the lives of enslaved individuals in the historic record.
To share the stories with living descendants, historians, and community members, the records — discovered among 89 collections preserved in the special collections archives — have been digitized for free online access with enhanced descriptions and full-text transcription. The work results in more than 1,705 items now freely available online through the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG), a partnership of the UGA Libraries and the GALILEO statewide virtual library. In addition, the information has been compiled into a dataset containing all the names, places, events, and sources, which has been submitted to Enslaved.org, a national discovery hub for datasets related to the lives of enslaved people.
“It is rewarding that descendant communities have already made use of the newly described and digitized content to locate mentions of their ancestors,” said Katherine Stein, associate university librarian for special collections and principal investigator of the grant. “The creation of the dataset allows disparate events throughout enslaved individuals' lives to be brought together and tell a complete story that would otherwise be undiscoverable.”
Alongside the digitization work, project coordinator Will Stanier shared the project with the community, welcoming groups to engage in transcribe-a-thons and preparing classroom activities for UGA students in archives-based classes.
“In many ways, the work of the project is ongoing,” digitization and data coordinator Chris Lott added. “Undergraduate research projects, additional work with the dataset, possible future outreach initiatives—in these ways and more, our goal is to maximize impact with descendants, genealogists, researchers, instructors, and the general public and to continue expanding and illuminating these histories.”