How Shall We Represent Their Lives?

Sharon M. Leon |@sharonmleon

Universities Studying Slavery

March 6, 2020

Old Isaac Remained

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

Mulledy Hall, 1903

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

The 1838 Community

Title Text

Jesuit Plantation Project

Enslaved Community owned by the Maryland Province Jesuits, 1740-1840

  • 1,132 people
  • 598 people with birth years
  • 393 children with at least one named parent

 

  • 34 Free people of color
  • 48 enslaved people owned by others

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
[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


Linked Open Data

  • Vocabularies with properties
    • Dublin Core, FOAF, Bio, Relationship, Schema
  • Sentence format:
    • URI [property] URI
    • Isaac Hawkins, II [bio:childOf] Isaac Hawkins, I
  • Resource Templates make up a Data Model
    • People
    • Events
    • Location

Marriage and Family

Major Contagions

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

Manumission, Sale, and Purchase Events

Proceedings of the Corporation of Roman Catholic Clergymen

1. To dispose for a limited time of the greatest part of the blacks on the different plantations appertaining to the select body.

2. To proceed gradually and with due attention to law in the execution of this resolve and not to offer too many for sale at one time.

3. The Representatives of the district, with the managers of the different plantations, shall select the blacks to be disposed of in such proportions the number to be sold at any time and the term of years for which they are to be sold.

June 1814

What Comes Next?

Events:

the Key to a Larger View

  • A shared data model
    • Life Course
    • Labor
    • Health and Sickness
    • Freedom Status
  • Linked Open Data to represent concepts, characteristics, and relationships
  • Micro and macro views of enslavement across institutions