Unknown No Longer: A Database of Virginia Slave Names
The best part of family research is that it is a work in
progress. Daily, new collections,
searchable databases, and even unknown papers are found, and made accessible to
researchers. Seldom however, do
genealogists get assistance researching their slave ancestors in a searchable,
accessible database. But the Virginia Historical Society of Richmond
VA launched and is consistently updating a slave database: Unknown No Longer: A Database of Virginia Slave Names.
It's
not enough to say, my ancestors were slaves, or my
ancestors were slave-owners. The
digitized documents of Unknown No Longer will allow researchers to
uncover a
more complex ancestral story than that told by census records. This tool
should be one more stop in your slave ancestry research.
"Since its founding in 1831, the VHS has collected unpublished manuscripts, a collection that now numbers more than 8 million processed items." From VHS website
The Unknown No Longer Database is free of charge. Keep in
mind, where there were slaves there were slave owners. This database will also
allow researchers of slave-owning families to gain more information on their family
history. As of today, there
are approximately 1600 names in the database, 300 are slave-owners.
Researchers may wish to use this database even if the slaves
were removed to other states "... our collections contain plantation
records, for example, kept by Virginians who moved to other states, taking
their slaves with them."
Kathleen Brandt
a3genealogy@gmail.com
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