Research Guides & Indexes: Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative: Related Resources

Related Resources

Court Records

Chancery Records Index
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.
Dinwiddie County Archives and Historical Documents
Selected court records from Dinwiddie County Circuit Court have been digitized and are freely accessible to the public.
Fairfax Court Slavery Index
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
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.
Know Their Names (Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County)
Database of digitized records of free and enslaved people from Fauquier County. Other digitized records available on website: https://www.aahafauquier.org/
Lantern Project
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.
Loudoun County Black History
Digitized records from the Loudon County Circuit Court.

General

African-American Families Database
Connects African American families to their antebellum roots and enables researchers to trace patterns of community formation in the post-bellum period.
Black Craftspeople Digital Archive
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.
Central Rappahannock Heritage Center Online Collections
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
Confederate Slave Payrolls (National Archives)
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.
Colored Conventions Project
Provides hundreds of digitized documents of the Colored Conventions Movement, spanning from the 1830s through the 1890s.
Digital Library on American Slavery
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.
Enduring Connections: Exploring Delmarva's Black History
Database of compiled original and transcribed sources that document the African-American experience in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.

FamilySearch This link opens in a new window
Provides the largest collection of freely available digitized genealogical records in the world, and is international in scope. All users must create a free account and log in to be able to view items. Please note: The Library of Virginia is a FamilySearch affiliate library which enables onsite users to have access to 400 million digitized records that are otherwise only available at LDS Church family history centers.
Catalog: Includes many digitized records that have not yet been indexed by FamilySearch, such as original county and city records and abstracts of records as well as early birth, marriage, and death registers from the Bureau of Vital Statistics.
Digital Library: Provides access to family histories, yearbooks, directories, maps, and more.
Wiki: A good starting point for genealogical research for any country.
Catalog: Includes many digitized records that have not yet been indexed by FamilySearch, such as original county and city records and abstracts of records as well as early birth, marriage, and death registers from the Bureau of Vital Statistics.
Digital Library: Provides access to family histories, yearbooks, directories, maps, and more.
Wiki: A good starting point for genealogical research for any country.

Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware (Paul Heinegg)
Genealogies of free African Americans in Virginia and surrounding states, as well as transcriptions of select "free Negro" registers and personal property tax lists.
Lynching and Racial Violence Collection
Digitized documents related to lynchings in Virginia between 1866 and 1932, specifically commonwealth causes and coroner's inquisitions housed at the Library of Virginia.
Mapping the Freedmen's Bureau
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.
O Say Can You See
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.

ProQuest History Vault. Southern Life and African American History, 1775–1915, Plantation Records (Parts 1 and 2) This link opens in a new window
Business records include ledger books, payroll books, cotton ginning books, work rules, account books, and receipts. Personal papers include family correspondence, diaries, and wills. Coverage: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida plantations.

Slavery Era Insurance Registry
Insurance policies from the archives of several insurance companies documenting insurance coverage held by enslavers for damage to or death of a slave.
Virginia Emigrants to Liberia
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.

Newspapers

Freedom on the Move (Cornell University)
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.
Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery
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.

Virginia Chronicle This link opens in a new window
Historical archive of Virginia newspapers, providing free access to over a million newspaper pages. Sensational court cases, coroner's inquisitions, and records involving notable figures will likely be covered in Virginia newspapers.

Research Guides

African American Research at the Library of Virginia to 1870
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.
County and City Records at the Library of Virginia
Provides links to records availability at the Library of Virginia, including formation histories for Virginia's counties and independent cities and microfilm availability.

Slave Trade

Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade
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.
Slave Voyages
Digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history.