Hi Vincent,

I was thinking more in terms of a mechanism by which people who have transcribed records could forward them to the LVA as eventually a lot of the deeds, land tax and personal property tax records would be then digitized.

Believe me I understand the enormity of the task to total digitalization. I’m often asked as an archaeologist which period of the past I would like to visit. I always tell them 200 years into the future when diseases are a thing of the past, body parts can be replaced and every single historical record is digitized.

Lyle

> On Jan 24, 2024, at 10:08 AM, Brooks, Vincent (LVA) <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Mr. Browning,
> 
> The Library of Virginia has a robust crowd-sourced transcription project including From the Page (transcription/indexing) and Virginia Chronicle (text correction). To-date, those efforts have indexed/transcribed/corrected over 5 million pages of original materials. It will never be possible to digitally reformat and transcribe the entirety of the Library's collections (which at last count was estimated to be 132,000,000 items). Further, the Library of Virginia does not have the ability to assign transcription work to students. Several educators, both high school and college level, have engaged their classes with our transcription project, and we certainly welcome that and facilitate that engagement whenever possible.
> 
> The purpose of The UncommonWealth blog, in part, is to highlight and bring attention to collection materials, many of which will never be digitally reformatted. The goal is to make these materials more discoverable in searches outside of the Library's catalog. The blog posts are evergreen and show up in Google results. Despite our daily efforts to make more materials available online, it will always be necessary for some researchers to visit the archives in-person in order to access the collections that interest them.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Vincent T. Brooks
> Local Records Program Manager
> Office: 804-692-3525
> Email: [log in to unmask]
> Address: 800 East Broad St., Richmond, VA 23219
> Website: www.lva.virginia.gov<http://www.lva.virginia.gov>
> ________________________________
> From: LyleBrowning <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2024 4:26 PM
> To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] The UncommonWealth
> 
> Hi,
> 
> These posts are cogent. However, the conversation runs between interested parties who read the original documents. Is there not a mechanism for the digital transcription of them such that those of interested in adjacent, peripheral or directly cogent interests can have them in digital format? My view is that the discussions are excellent, but that we “silo” the information by not having it available digitally for others who may have an alternative view that would be best served by a digital archive. Is it not possible to assign classes of students to transcribe one page and over a couple of semesters, have a digital transcription of the document?
> 
> Lyle Browning, RPA
> 
>> On Jan 22, 2024, at 9:21 PM, Henry Wiencek <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>> Thank you, Vincent, for posting the Lynchburg ledger. I guess that only an
>> obsessive would say that a ledger is fascinating. As have many members of
>> this list, I’ve spent many months, years, scrutinizing ledgers. I remember
>> 25 years ago when I was finishing my work on the Hairston families I
>> mentioned to Ed Ayers that if any of his grad students were looking for a
>> Master’s thesis idea, they should go to Alderman and read the microfilm of
>> the Beaver Creek plantation ledger kept by Ann Hairston Hairston (that’s
>> not a typo: Ann Hairston married her cousin Marshall Hairston and became
>> Ann Hairston Hairston. The original Beaver Creek ledger is at Southern
>> Historical Collection at UNC.) Far as I know, none of the students picked
>> up on that idea. It was only by finding Ann Hairston’s list of the
>> distribution of blankets that I stumbled across mothers-fathers-children
>> and from those lists of names, families emerged, and I was able to link
>> those lists to the Cohabitation Register. And so, out of a mundane business
>> record, life stories came forth. I’m working on a new study of the Hairston
>> family and I expect that this ledger will be revealing because all the
>> Hairston business flowed through Lynchburg.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> As many of you know, Lynchburg was the major center of trade and the James
>> River shipping point for southern Virginia in all kinds of goods, farm
>> equipment, imported luxuries, and tobacco, &c. Many roads led to Lynchburg.
>> Hogsheads of tobacco, raised by enslaved people, passed through the
>> Lynchburg traders and from there to Richmond and then by ship to Europe,
>> mainly to France. (One of the things I noticed in studying the Hairston
>> papers is how closely the planters in the interior – the broad region of
>> Danville, Martinsville, Halifax, and into North Carolina -- followed
>> newspaper reports of the markets, banking, currency, and war news from
>> France, which was the major market for Virginia tobacco.) Lynchburg was a
>> financial center, in its way. At one point a Hairston planter had a $12,000
>> credit with a Lynchburg merchant but couldn't withdraw any hard money
>> because there was no specie in southern Virginia. It’s revealing to see how
>> the market worked. Through these records we can see how the wealth flowed,
>> and we can “follow the money.” And everything, all the wealth, came from
>> forced labor. So in these pages there are life stories.
>> 
>> Henry Wiencek
>> 
>> Charlottesville
>> 
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