This might be a good time to remind our readers about the Lancaster County Estates Project, which abstracted all wills and estates from the period 1835-1865. This funded in part by a grant by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and sponsored by the Mary Ball Washington Museum & Library. Over 3,000 slave records were abstracted (some of these of course were the same people being identified in various records from one generation/owner to the next, as well as anything else of genealogical of sociological interest.  All of this is now in a searchable and interactive on-line data base at:

http://mbwm.org/estates.asp

This is the "home page" for the data base. It contains an overview of the project and some interesting statistics. To actually USE datable clear on the "here" hot link in the second paragraph.  We found very few surnames in these records. However, an offshoot of this project was an article I wrote for The Bulletin of the Northumberland County Historical Society about two bachelor brothers named Kelley, merchants of Kilmarnock, who emancipated 49 of their slaves in 1856 and sent them to Liberia. On the ships passenger list, not one of them used the surname Kelley, and they grouped by family structure with ages (As reported in *The African Repository* the organ for the American Colonization Society.

If anyone is interested in reading this article, it can be downloaded from my web site here:

http://www.craigkilby.com/publihed/



Craig Kilby

On Sep 11, 2011, at 2:18 PM, Terry Meyers wrote:

> 
> 	Thanks to Steven Corneliussen for this, and for his mention of W&M's Lemon Project (of which I'm now co-chair, with Rob Vinson of our History Department).
> 
> 	Members of the list who might be interested in the College's efforts will find more information at our website:
> 
> 		http://www.wm.edu/sites/lemonproject/index.php
> 
> 	The link there to "Research and Resources" goes to several sites, including one that  mentions several discoveries: the metes and bounds of the College's Nottoway Quarter (our 18th C. tobacco plantation, mentioned in no history of W&M) and George Greenhow, our antebellum custodian who liked to boast he was the "only negro ever educated at William and Mary" (taught to read and write by a student, in return for Mrs. Greenhow's doing the student's laundry).
> 
> 	A number of initiatives are underway--I'm working on W&M and the Lost Cause, looking into how faculty and others associated with the College at the time reconstructed and idealized slavery locally.  
> 
> 	And with much more uncertainty and diffidence, I'm contemplating hints that the College in the 18th C, before it was taken over by the likes of Thomas Roderick Dew, might have been in some ways a force destabilizing to the institution of slavery.  
> 
> 	All advice and cautions much appreciated--and if anyone knows especially about Samuel Henley (1740-1815) and his Socinian / Deist leanings and their implications regarding slavery, I would be delighted to correspond.
> 
> 	The ODNB account of Henley  treats him well,  but Karl Thompson in 1961 concluded (even while largely defending him in the circumstances surrounding Henley's translation of Vathek) that he was "a mediocrity and an unimaginative laborer in the vineyards of literature."  
> 
> 	And although speculation almost a century ago was that Byron must have known Henley at Harrow, where Henley left W&M to teach, André Parreaux went further in a note to Thompson's article, intimating that Byron's fondness for Vathek was "connected with some deep lying affinity between the two men," hinting, I presume, at a homosexual relationship.
> 
> 	Parreaux cites the "dark beginnings of Henley's career" here at William and Mary, where Henley offered lectures on poetry and composed occasional verse and where he was refused appointment to Bruton Parish Church for his supposed unorthodoxy.
> 
> 	I'm curious as to what his view of slavery might have been.
> 
> 	
> On Sep 10, 2011, at 7:22 AM, Steve Corneliussen wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Thanks, Virginia Historical Society -- and thanks, William and Mary, site of the Lemon Project, a comparable effort. The retrospective conferral of dignity and respect starts by finding out names, and continues by pressing us to realize that the logic, such as it was, and the language of the slavery era still taint understanding.
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Terry L.. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg Virginia  23187              757-221-3932
> 
> 		http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/tlmeye/   
> 
> 		http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/_ecology.html
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>       Have we got a college?  Have we got a football team?....Well, we can't afford both.   Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.
>            															 --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."
> 
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