Through the Lens of Data:

The Enslaved People Owned and Sold by the Maryland Province Jesuits

Sharon M. Leon

@sharonmleon

Loyola University | February 22, 2019

all our married people who had married out of our farms, have been sold to the masters of their husbands or wifes, or to the next neighbors of them, so that husbands & wives are together, but some children who could not be sold with their mothers, have been sent with the others to Louisiana. There remain in our farms only few old people, well provided for their life times. So old Isaac remained at W. Marsh

Fidelis Grivel to Charles Lancaster, May 4, 1839

Old Isaac Remained

Isaac Hawkins Hall (Mulledy Hall)

Thomas Mulledy

The Hawkins Family

Jesuit Plantation Project

slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu

Working with the Data of Slavery

The Enslaved Group

1,140 individuals owned by the Jesuits (1717-1840)
- 587 individuals with birth years
30 enslaved people owned by others
32 free Blacks

Relationships in the Records

108 inferred partnerships (216 individuals)
- 13 sacramental marriages
394 identified parental relationship
- 86 baptisms
- 141 births
57 deaths indicated
- 12 deaths with specific date

[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

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

Linked Open Data

Each entity has a unique resource identifier (URI)
Those URIs are served over the web
Descriptive data about those entities is served using standards
Those standards make that data interoperable and promote aggregation and integration of material across the web

Change over Place & Time

Estate	Total Enslaved	Workers	Indoors	Fields	Child/Elderly
St. Inigoe's Manor	20	12	3	9	8
Newtown	29	15	3	12	14
St. Thomas's Manor	38	21	3	18	17
White Marsh	65	29	3	26	36
St. Joseph's Manor	7	5	1	4	2
St. Marie's Manor	7	4	1	3	3
Bohemia Manor	26	15	3	12	11
Total	192	101	17	84	91

George Hunter's 1765 Survey

Family Growth

Social Network Analysis ?

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 Measurements

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