Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative

Chancery cause records from Virginia's circuit courts. Freedom suits, lawsuits initiated by enslaved people seeking to gain their freedom, were also heard in chancery courts. These court cases rely heavily on witness testimony and contain considerable historical and genealogical information.

Selected court records from Dinwiddie County Circuit Court have been digitized and are freely accessible to the public.

Index of enslaved individuals who appear in the records of the Fairfax Circuit Court between the years 1742 and 1870.

Histories Along the Blue Ridge (formerly known as Exploring Rockingham’s Past) is a digital project collaboration between the Rockingham County Circuit Court and James Madison University that makes selected historic records digitally available to the public. The project currently includes records from the counties of Rockingham, Augusta, Madison, and Rappahannock. Please note that while some records include enslaved and free Black and Multiracial individuals, the project is not specifically focused on African American history.

Database of digitized records of free and enslaved people from Fauquier County. Other digitized records available on website: https://www.aahafauquier.org/

Collaborative project led by Mississippi State University as part of a coalition of institutions located within Mississippi and Alabama. It provides, for the first time, centralized and institutionally supported access to information in legal records documenting enslaved persons.

Digitized records from the Loudon County Circuit Court.

Connects African American families to their antebellum roots and enables researchers to trace patterns of community formation in the post-bellum period. 

Seeks to enhance what is known about Black craftspeople who lived in the eighteenth-century South Carolina Lowcountry and mid-nineteenth century Tennessee by telling both a spatial story and an historically informed story that highlights the lives of Black craftspeople and the objects they produced.

Personal papers, newspapers, court documents, cemetery records, church histories, photographs and compiled local histories from several Virginia localities in the central Rappahannock region, some of which have been digitized. Learn more about the entire collection: https://www.crhcarchives.org/collections

Payrolls for slave labor on Confederate military defenses, including forts, entrenchments, obstructions on navigable rivers, "nitre" works, harness-making shops, ordnance works, and arsenals, in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, digitized by the National Archives.

Provides hundreds of digitized documents of the Colored Conventions Movement, spanning from the 1830s through the 1890s.

Compiles independent collections focused upon race and slavery in the American South. Houses tens of thousands of records relating to all 15 slave states and Washington, D.C. as well as a number of northern states.

Database of compiled original and transcribed sources that document the African-American experience in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.

Genealogies of free African Americans in Virginia and surrounding states, as well as transcriptions of select "free Negro" registers and personal property tax lists.

Digitized documents related to lynchings in Virginia between 1866 and 1932, specifically commonwealth causes and coroner's inquisitions housed at the Library of Virginia.

Resources related to Freedmen's Bureau records which includes a map marking the sites of Freedmen’s Bureau Field Offices and Contraband Camps. You can scroll in to see the sites nearest your area of research interest. When you click on a marker, you will see the microfilm rolls for that location.

This site documents the challenge to slavery and the quest for freedom in early Washington, D.C., by collecting, digitizing, making accessible, and analyzing freedom suits filed between 1800 and 1862,
as well as tracing the multigenerational family networks they reveal.

Insurance policies from the archives of several insurance companies documenting insurance coverage held by enslavers for damage to or death of a slave.

The heart of the website is a dataset that reveals 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 American Colonization Society housed at the Library of Congress, and myriad other
sources. Some of the individuals listed in the database can be found in the "Colonization Records" collection in Virginia Untold.

Database of fugitives from North American slavery as documented by "runaway ads" posted by enslavers and ads posted by jailers which describe the individuals they have apprehended.

Digitized and transcribed advertisements that were placed in newspapers across the United States (and beyond) by formerly enslaved people searching for family members and loved ones after emancipation.

Many records of African Americans in Virginia prior to 1870 may be found by searching the original and microfilmed records. This guide provides an overview of the types of records that are available.

Provides links to records availability at the Library of Virginia, including formation histories for Virginia's counties and independent cities and microfilm availability.

Helps users to search and find information from a large and growing number of datasets and digital projects. Researchers can learn from linking data, visualizing larger relations and movements, and connecting people from one dataset to the next.

Digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history.