Hi VA-HISTers!
Thought some of you might find this of interest.

What:                         The Virginia Historical Society (VHS)  
launches Unknown No Longer: A Database of Virginia Slave Names.

When:                        Thursday, September 15, 2011

Where:                      The Unknown No Longer database is  
accessible via the VHS website, www.vahistorical.org.

Who:                          The creation of the Unknown No Longer  
database was made possible by a $100,000 grant from Dominion Resources  
and the Dominion Foundation. This grant was awarded to the Virginia  
Historical Society in January 2011.

Why:                          Unknown No Longer makes important  
African American resources available to researchers across the globe  
free of charge.

The database includes names of enslaved African Americans culled from  
letters, bonds, wills, deeds, court records, inventory lists,  
receipts, registers, and other paper-based materials in the Virginia  
Historical Society collections. Unknown No Longer is searchable  
through the use of a variety of keywords, such as name, gender,  
location, occupation, and plantation.

The VHS is launching this free educational resource with more than  
1,500 names, higher than the 1,000 names that the VHS anticipated  
being in the database at its launch this month. Each name entered is  
connected to the digital copy of the original primary source document  
from which it was extracted. At this point, there are approximately  
250 different digital images in the database.

Unknown No Longer is unique in design and approach. Existing databases  
profile specific plantations and ship manifests with African names of  
their human cargo or other forced migratory information. Unknown No  
Longeris the first database to include names that relate back to  
plantations or places of work across all of slaveholding Virginia that  
were extracted from a huge collection of unrelated documents.

The database does not contain names that may appear in published  
sources at the society or in unpublished sources located in museums  
and libraries other than the VHS.

It could take years to scour the more than eight million documents in  
the VHS collection. Rather than wait to find all of the names of  
enslaved people, the VHS is launching Unknown No Longer as a work in  
progress. Information in the database will be updated as relevant  
material in the VHS manuscript collection is processed and new  
documents come into the society’s possession.
Alyson L. Taylor-White
804-920-2783




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