FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
10/24/2023

Worthy Martin

*The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities*

University of Virginia
Phone: (434) 924-4527

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UVA’s IATH Launches its Latest Humanities Project Website

*‘Virginia Emigrants to Liberia’ Facilitates Local and Trans-Atlantic
Research*



Charlottesville, VA: Today, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the
Humanities (IATH) launched a greatly enhanced and expanded Virginia
Emigrants to Liberia website:
https://virginians-to-liberia.iath.virginia.edu/. The National Endowment
for the Humanities funded the project with a Humanities’ Collections and
Reference Resources award.



The website will facilitate grassroots-level research on Black Virginians
who emigrated to the west coast of Africa under the auspices of the
American Colonization Society, and together established the colony of
Liberia. In 1847, the colony became the first independent republic in
Africa, with Virginian Joseph Jenkins Roberts elected its first president.
The heart of the website, the major enhancement, is a dataset that reveals
often detailed information on 3,882 emigrants, 157 potential emigrants, and
about 350 white agents—slaveholders, emancipators, facilitators, and
supporters—associated with specific emigrants and colonization efforts.
Much of the information comes from the voluminous Records of the American
Colonization Society housed at the Library of Congress, and myriad other
sources.



This website shares and builds upon the research of Dr. Marie Tyler-McGraw,
whose book, *An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making
of Liberia*, explores the web of connections in Virginia and across the
Atlantic. The second major enhancement is that the database provides links
in the records of the individuals to digital images of more than 1,000
letters and other primary sources that document those individuals. Together,
these resources illuminate family and community life across the color line
on both sides of the Atlantic, as people wrestled with issues of daily
life, slavery and freedom, race and citizenship. They are rich in
information that is scarce on Black individuals in that era, including
surnames, ages, family relationships, occupations, literacy, religion, and
enslavers’ names and localities.


Records of emigration reveal a complex web of motives and hopes that drove
people to fund and to risk a dangerous voyage from one hostile environment
to another. We hope to be able to build on this work to connect with
descendants of the emigrants on both sides of the Atlantic and to explore
the long consequences of these journeys.



Virginia Emigrants to Liberia was made possible in part by a grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Created in
1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the
Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature,
philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected,
peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information
about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is
available at: www.neh.gov.



IATH is a research unit established by the University of Virginia in 1992,
now part of the University of Virginia Library. The team’s goal is to
explore and develop information technology as a tool for scholarly
humanities research. Their research projects and websites are the products
of a unique collaboration between humanities and computer science research
faculty, independent historians and researchers, computer professionals,
student assistants and project managers, and library faculty and staff.

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