[FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE]

VCDH Announces Official Launch of Virginia Emigrants To Liberia Website

http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/liberia

Charlottesville, Virginia, Oct. 1, 2008: Virginia Emigrants to Liberia, a
new website directed by scholars affiliated with the Virginia Center for
Digital History (VCDH) at the University of Virginia, opens a window into
the lives of free black and enslaved Virginians, the trans-Atlantic world
they inhabited, and the African nation they helped to found.

Between 1820 and 1865, some 3,700 African Americans left Virginia for
Liberia, the West African settlement founded by the American Colonization
Society (ACS).  About one-quarter of these emigrants were free blacks, the
rest newly manumitted slaves, most freed upon the condition of their
voluntary resettlement in the ACS-governed colony (1820-1847) and
independent black republic (1847-present) across the Atlantic. More than two
hundred white Virginians emancipated slaves for emigration.

Through the Virginia Emigrants to Liberia website
<www.vcdh.virginia.edu/liberia>, officially launched by VCDH on October 1,
researchers can gather census-like information on individual emigrants from
a searchable database, read stories about emigrants and emancipators, and
easily access related online resources. The database enables historians and
genealogists to collect and analyze data not usually available for enslaved
people, such as surnames and family relationships, and connect people to
localities on both continents.

The website features a variety of resources, the heart of which is a
searchable database of emigrants and emancipators. The Emigrants table is
searchable by first and last name, place of origin in Virginia, ship,
emancipator, and destination in Liberia. It provides detailed shipboard
census information often including full names, family relationships,
occupation and literacy; data from the 1843 Liberian census; and additional
information from ACS and First African Baptist Church (Richmond) records.
The Emancipator table is searchable by surname, county, and year of
emancipation.

Other resources on the website include ten stories of emigrants and
emancipators, representing a range of experiences. For example, emigrant
Hilary Teage wrote the Liberian Declaration of Independence in 1847 and
Joseph Jenkins Roberts became the world’s first African American president.
Harriet Graves Waring became a reluctant founding mother, and Augustus
Curtis participated in the slave trade (Roberts avowed Curtis was the only
African American who did so) and lived among the Vai people. Patrick Bullock
and his family felt abandoned as they endured illness and starvation.

Broadly collaborative in design, the Virginia Emigrants to Liberia project
builds on the painstaking research of two leading historians of Virginia
colonization: Dr. Marie Tyler-McGraw, author of the book An African
Republic: Black And White Virginians In The Making Of Liberia (University of
North Carolina Press, 2007), and Dr. Deborah A. Lee, who has researched and
written on women colonizationists, the Underground Railroad, and antislavery
in the mid-Atlantic region.  It features as well an illustrated essay by
Harvard University doctoral candidate Dalila Scruggs. Scruggs analyzed
images produced by black settlers and white colonizationists to better
understand underlying cultural beliefs and how they were used to promote the
colonization movement in the antebellum United States.

The web project was funded by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and
the database developed in partnership with the Afro-American Historical
Association of Fauquier County.

VCDH director Scot French hailed the project as a major step toward
expanding public awareness of the Virginia colonization movement’s social,
cultural, and geopolitical dimensions, as well as a research and teaching
tool with great potential for development and expansion.

"I’m thrilled that Deborah Lee and Marie Tyler-McGraw chose to work with
VCDH on this project. These two scholars, working in traditional archives,
conducted research of enormous significance to the study of slavery,
freedom, race, and nationality on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, through
this unique website, they have made their findings widely accessible to the
public as searchable data, narrated stories, and scholarly essays.”

Now in its tenth year, the Virginia Center for Digital History is committed
to advancing knowledge through the application of digital technologies to
history and related fields of scholarly inquiry; designing and developing
innovative applications of technology in consultation with historians and
other project partners, and facilitating exchanges among educators with a
shared commitment to transforming how history is taught, learned and
accessed in the Digital Age.

Contact:

Scot A. French
Director / Associate Professor
Virginia Center for Digital History
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu
Alderman Library ~ Taylor Room
P.O. Box 400116
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4116
434-924-3804 [ phone ]
434-243-5566 [ fax ]
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