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Enslaved family history records brought to public light by Mississippi project
Ross ReilyMississippi Clarion Ledger
Oct 11, 2022
For many Americans, finding a family's history is a relatively straightforward process. Multiple research options allow people to find their people from the moment they stepped onto the shores of this country and even before.
The problem with genealogical research for many African Americans is that before 1870, there were very few records because they were not documented as human beings but as property.
However, an ongoing multi-state project enlisting help from three universities and libraries hopes to build a bridge for African American families wanting to trace their roots.
The Lantern Project is an effort to scan and make available to the public legal records documenting enslaved persons. Probate records and various other legal records from the early 1800s have been or are being scanned and will be available to people doing family history research or anyone interested.
This effort is intended to shine a light – thus the name Lantern – into ancestry that has been difficult to trace. The project has scanned Adams County court records from early statehood and some from Washington and Lowndes counties
Six institutions are participating in the project: Mississippi State University, University of Mississippi, Delta State, Historic Natchez Foundation, Columbus-Lowndes Public Library, and Montgomery County (Alabama) Archives.
Mississippi State University Library's Coordinator of Manuscripts, Jennifer McGillan, is spearheading the project and has recently been traveling the state to give presentations on the efforts. She will be giving a presentation at 7 p.m. Monday at Jackson State as a part of that process.
"Part of this was using the power of a big university to raise all of the boats," McGillan said. "We are able to bring in participation from a public library and a historical society that otherwise would not have been able to do this."
Thousands of documents have now been digitized, and McGillan and her partners are in the process of getting those "transcribed and described" and uploaded into the MSU digital collections.
The information will also be shared with the Digital Library of American Slavery at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and also with enslaved.org, which is a project shared by the University of Maryland, Michigan State University and the University of California-Riverside.
Funding was awarded in 2019 by the National Historical Publication and Records Commission, but the project started slowly because of Covid-19. Since restrictions have changed, McGillan has gotten a significant amount of work and research done.
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Some of the most enormous treasure troves of documents have come from Natchez and Noxubee County because those courthouses were never burned during the Civil War. The research has also discovered plantation records found in personal and family papers, which include plantation journals and even individual receipts recording people's transactions into slavery and the transfer of enslaved people from one place to another.
"We have really been focusing on dates from colonization (and prior in the case of Natchez) to around 1865," McGillan said. "There are some territory time records of enslaved persons and the families of their enslavers for Mississippi that are included in this."
Sharon Morgan, an African American genealogist from Lowndes County, has an online community of more than 37,000 looking for their family history. Morgan says the Lantern Project is an essential tool for people to learn who they are and where they came fromfro
She has been scouring the records in Noxubee County for years, and the Lantern Project has made that process easier.
"Jennifer has been an incredible asset because when you do family research, much of it leads back to the 10 Southern states that were slave-holding states," Morgan said. "Mississippi is a big one.
"This is an extremely important thing to do to be able to document the historical information that allows you to connect with your ancestors. This is a major resource."
"As an example, I am now able to research my family names of Nicholson and Gavin (because of the Lantern Project)," Morgan said. "I have been able to find records that relate to those two slaveholders."
In one of those cases, Morgan has documents dating to 1840.
"It is extraordinary that we have access to this," Morgan said.
Getting beyond the 1870 census has been the vast wall that has faced historians and genealogists to this point because that is the point where freedmen first appeared with names and ages as human beings and not property.
The purpose is to facilitate access and put all the records in one place, allowing families and historians to research without having to drive hundreds of miles to each courthouse to piece together bits of information. Much of that would have taken months or years without the Lantern Project.
There is not representation from all 82 counties in Mississippi or all counties in Alabama or elsewhere because so many documents were burned or destroyed. The most significant concentration of information has come from Natchez to this point.
"Natchez was the center of the slave-holding universe," McGillan said. "There was a high concentration of slaveholders in Natchez, so there are going to be a lot of people with roots in Natchez."
Beyond the inside details of all this research, Morgan says the project is a part of enlightening the greater population about the natural history of Mississippi, the slave-holding South and the colonized states.
Morgan said Mississippi's history is full of challenges and is frustrated by the state's past.
"I live here, and I love Mississippi, but we need to bring the history to light because the people who do not study the history are doomed to repeat it," Morgan said.
"So, it is important for us to realize that [expletive] happens. We can't change that. We can, however, change the future. Uncovering the past and making information available to people is a way of informing people and changing the future. That can be a very healing act for all of us."
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