Grant backs project to digitally preserve slave deeds across North Carolina

Molly Horak | The Citizen-Times

ASHEVILLE - A grant to digitize slave deed records across the state is opening doors to preserve and learn from the documents of North Carolina's past.

Just shy of $300,000 was awarded by the National Historic Publications and Records Commission to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro to fund the expansion of a project to digitize nearly 10,000 slave deeds and bills of sale from 26 counties across the state. Once digitized, the records will go into a searchable database accessible to the public.

“It’s a massive project," said Buncombe County Register of Deeds Drew Reisinger. "It’s not a simple task to go back through records in every courthouse in the South, find all of the slave deed records, digitize them and make them available."

And Reisinger would know — the statewide project is modeled in part after the Buncombe County slave deeds project that he began in 2012, after realizing that slave deeds and bills of sale were considered property records, and therefore, were housed in his office. The records were made digital and uploaded to a countywide database, allowing community members, historians and descendants of slave owners to search the materials for references to their past.

But having an online record of one county's slave deeds just isn't enough, Reisinger said.

"Slaves were traded across county lines and across state lines, so just having one county didn’t do much for people looking for their ancestors," he said. "For this purpose it would be incredibly useful to have a statewide database or a national database, which is absolutely our goal.”

Collaboration across counties, organizations

People Not Property — Slave Deeds of North Carolina, housed at the UNC Greensboro Digital Library on American Slavery, is the first major effort to create a statewide database of digitized slave records. The project has worked to aggregate digitized slave deeds from counties across the state, but thanks to the federal grant funding, will now be able to expand their database to include records from 26 more counties.

Counties were selected by a number of criteria, including if the county was established prior to the 1865 and if the county had already digitized any of their records. A mix of eastern, western, urban and rural counties were selected as the first to be digitized, with the hope that one day, People Not Property will include records from every county in the state.

UNC Greensboro will work in collaboration with the North Carolina State Archives, the Afro-American Genealogical Society, professors, students, volunteers, and county registrars across the state to implement and expand the project, said Richard Cox, digital technology consultant at the university, who is the project lead.

The federal grant funding will help pay for a project coordinator to work with students and volunteers, as well as the costs associated with getting data from the 26 selected counties indexed, add metadata, scanned and transcribed, Cox said.

“Public records in a public agency are the people’s records, and it makes sense to be available to everyone," Reisinger said. "Not every office has the resources to do that though — some counties just have one or two employees — but this grant will help us get there.”

Deborah Miles, recently retired director of the Center for Diversity Education at UNC Asheville, played an integral role in launching the Buncombe County Slave Deeds project. She now serves on the People Not Property working group to help facilitate the coordination and direction of the project.

As the records are being digitized and made more accessible, it's important for students and community members alike to visit their local Register of Deeds and see the documents up close — for the way forward to healing and accept is through recognizing the atrocities of the past, Miles said.

“There’s this amazing power when you have people reading the records and they suddenly understand what it’s saying. It’s almost like their heart stops,” she said.

A way to trace family roots

To Sasha Mitchell, family historian and chair of the Buncombe County African American Heritage Commission, the grant funding to consolidate records across the state is tremendous.

“There is a paper trail and this is it — this is the path of my ancestors, through slave deeds and bills of sale,” Mitchell said.

Often, the process to look at her family's records is arduous, she said. She recently traveled to UNC Chapel Hill to access several papers tied to her enslaved ancestors. The papers were pulled from a collection and were not allowed to leave a specific room in the library. Ultimately, she took photographs of the documents before driving four hours back to Asheville.

“Speaking as someone who looks frantically for this kind of thing but is often hindered by physical distance or accessibility of the document, now there may be an easier way to have access," Mitchell said. "It may not be evident yet, but when the first counties go online and people can search for their missing ancestors, it will be amazing.”

Digitizing the documents also protects against anything happening to the records, Mitchell said. Just as the African-American slaves were segregated and marginalized, so too were their records, she said, causing many to be lost over time.

If the statewide project succeeds, the dream would be for all slave records to ultimately be digitized and entered into a database, Reisinger said. However, states differ in terms of how records were recorded and what information was included, making it difficult to create a singular database that crosses state lines.

“What we learned in Buncombe County is that the project can be bigger, can be better," Reisinger said. "(People Not Property) is partially built off of the Buncombe County model of digitizing records, but with this funding, others can start to do things bigger and better than what we started.”