Jesuit Plantation Project Redux

Sharon M. Leon |@sharonmleon

Organization of American Historians | April 12, 2018

Mulledy Hall, 1903

Thomas F. Mulledy, S.J. (1794-1861)

slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu

Title Text

[1802 Dr St. Thomas's Manor in acct with Cash]
[1803]
[Jan]
26     To cash from Henny for 3 barrels corn @ $2   6.00  2.5.0
April 22    To Cash recd for sale of negro Constant, property of N.L. Sewall's estate  101.10.0

[opposite folio 1802 Contra Cr.]
[1803]
[Jan]
10    By do to do (the Taylor C. Layman) for making a servant's great coat  0.12.6
April 22  By Do [cash] to Mrs. Dorothy Digges for negro woman Jenny & her child  85.0.0

Enslaved Community owned by the Maryland Province Jesuits, 1740-1800.

• 1,081 people 
• 552 people with birth years
• 391 children with at least one named parent

• 32 Free people of color
• 30 enslaved people owned by others

jesuitplantationproject.org

Derived data

• Hand generated from document transcriptions
• Individuals and relationships processed to People with Unique ID, and then de-dupped
• Appearances processed to Events with participants
• Event types: birth, baptism, marriage, death, inventory, health, sale, legal, labor, commerce, conditions, travel, punishment, run away
• Imported to Omeka S to publish LOD

Key Questions

• Are these communities more or less stable than others?

• Are these kinship networks more or less dense than others?

• How do they change over time?

Human Stories through Data

Major Contagions

• Early 1790s: Small pox
• Near constant malaria
• 1827-1828: Typhoid

From Family Trees to Networks

Questions about using SNA

• What does it mean to analyze a community that is bounded and has very little control over their inclusion/movement? 

• With a significantly incomplete data set, what is the threshold at which social network analysis is revealing?

• What are the appropriate visualizations to provide an entry point to this medium-sized collection of data points?

Newtown Community

Social Network Analysis

• Average Degree: Average number of connections
• Density: Inclusiveness (total number of points minus the isolated ones) and the sum of the degrees of its points 
• Average Path Length: average number of edges from one point to another