Process

Documents

A List of Negroes Belonging to the Estate of John Robinson Dec.d at death time [1826, written in/modified 1831]

After surveying material held by Leyburn Library's Special Collections and Archives, we determined that items related to "Jockey" John Robinson's bequest to Washington College would be a manageable body of documents to begin the project. At the time of his death in 1826, Robinson enslaved 73 people at his plantation, Hart’s Bottom, in southeastern Rockbridge County, Virginia. Robinson’s will stated that the individuals bequeathed to Washington College were to remain enslaved by the school for 50 years after his death in order to benefit the college.  

Relevant documents came from the following collections:

  • Reid Family Papers (WLU Coll. 0027) - Samuel McDowell Reid was a college trustee from 1819-1869, secretary of the board from 1844-1853, and at one time, clerk of the Rockbridge County Court. 
  • Trustees' Papers (WLU RG 0002) - Items from the Trustees’ Papers include copies of John Robinson’s will, receipts, promissory notes, invoices, and correspondence.
  • Rockbridge County court documents - Items on microfilm from the Rockbridge County Courthouse include the Will Books, detailing all financial transactions, by year, related to the Robinson Estate from 1828-1858, including the hiring out of enslaved persons. 

In order to establish a comprehensive list of persons involved, three primary documents were used. From our own collections, we selected an 1826 list of persons enslaved by Robinson at the time of his death, an 1834 inventory of persons still enslaved by Washington College, and from a Rockbridge County Court House Will Book, an 1826 appraisement of persons enslaved by Robinson at the time of his death.   

The 1826 list of persons enslaved by Robinson at the time of his death presents several challenges to the researcher. Created sometime after Robinson’s death, the list includes information that wouldn’t be known until well after 1826, like births, deaths, and hiring information that does not correlate with other 1826 hiring records. Instead of being a snapshot in time, as the title would suggest, it seems that Samuel McDowell Reid likely used the document as a running list, editing as needed, over the years. 

Data Model

The data model for the On These Grounds project privileges events over full text transcription or accounting-based models. Rather than read and interpret a document from the perspective of an enslaver who is accounting for their property, we look for evidence of events in the lives of enslaved individuals. We might rely on multiple documents from different archival collections to fill in details about a single event. We work from an established list of event types in major categories such as Commercial Transaction, Freedom Status, Labor, Life, Resistance, or Travel. For example, the event type of Commercial Event covers all events "in which an enslaved person is part of a transaction that involves the buying or selling of goods, services, or labor."  Within Commerical Event, there are more specific situations like "Enslaved hire" and  "Enslaved loan" where the enslaved person is being hired out or loaned to another person as well as "Services" and "Small Goods" where an enslaved person is buying/selling their own service or small goods.  

Similarly, the values of the fields we enter about each event are taken from a controlled vocabulary. For example, the "Date Certainty" field, we choose from "approxmiate," "inferred," or "questionable" to indicate our certainty when recording dates. The controlled vocabularies themselves are sourced from the Enslaved project, a larger data aggregration project.

The goal of the On These Grounds project is to refine these categories and terms so they are accurate and able to be used by multiple institutions and projects.

By using Omeka S as our platform, we are able to store and share our data as linked open data (LOD). In contrast to the tabular data found in spreadsheets, the structure of linked data creates a network of relationships between data fields. In addition to creating event records, we create records for people, places, and organizations. Any information we find about a person that is not part of an event in their life is added to the individual's record. We cite every source document used to put together a record, so not only can you trace information back to the original document, but you can view all the events supported by that document. Eventually, our web of data will be connected and viewed alongside data from other institutions.

If you'd like to learn more about the ontology and controlled vocabularies, visit the On These Grounds website.

Platform

Omeka S serves as the platform for this project. At W&L, we use Omeka S to host a variety of digital exhibits and collections related to local and institutional history. We rely on the following Omeka modules to properly describe and display our data:

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