Genealogy, or the study of family lineage, can be a fairly difficult process. It involves tracing all manner of documents backward through time to establish a connection.
However, for African Americans, this process is even more difficult and oftentimes nearly impossible when researching the time before the Civil War.
“For a lot of African Americans, they can hit a wall in 1865,” said Mona Vance-Ali, an archivist for the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library (CLPL). “They are going backwards, as far back as they can go, and it gets very difficult pre-1865. The records were just kept differently based on how society was structured.”
This is where the “Lantern Project” comes in. Its name is symbolic, according to Jennifer McGillan, coordinator of manuscripts for Mississippi State University and the creator of the project.
“In contemporary accounts of family separation, it comes up over and over again, they refer to their relatives being swallowed by darkness, disappearing into darkness,” she said. “When they were, ‘Sold down the river,’ it was our river, The Mississippi, and other local waterways.
So, this is our effort to turn on the lights.”
The project is a collaboration among multiple institutions in the state, as well as one in Alabama, with MSU leading the charge.
“I was inspired by a similar project in Virginia called ‘Unknown No Longer.’” McGillan said. “I saw that and had gone to a Society of American Archivists session about it, and I thought to myself, ‘How do I do this at home?’”
She learned about a grant program through the National Historical Publications Records Commission (NHPRC) that funded projects to digitize early legal records. After forming the coalition composed of MSU, the University of Mississippi, Delta State, the Historic Natchez Foundation, CLPL and the Montgomery County Archives in Alabama, and presenting the necessary information, the “Lantern Project” received a grant for $340,424.
However, the grant was approved in December 2019, right on the cusp of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The program, despite the setback, is now up and running, and it has already begun populating the database with records.
The records being digitized are pre-Civil War documents pertaining to enslaved people.
However, the types of documents the project is focusing on are legal documents such as court records.
“Many times people think that the only locations where you would find information like that, about enslaved persons, would be say a plantation journal, or maybe the personal memoirs of somebody after the fact,” Vance-Ali said. “The reality is that either city minutes or court records often will have a plethora of information about enslaved persons.”
The project, in addition to digitizing the documents and adding them to the database, also is extracting names and cataloging them within the database to make searching for relevant documents easier.
The project seeks to not only assist in genealogy research, but also to help paint a picture of the time period.
“This really kind of helps give researchers a window into the day to day existence,” Vance-Ali said. “You can also study the change of crime over time and how African Americans were treated over time. It’s just really expanding the idea of what that time period looked like.”
Additionally, it helps bring together related information from different areas to create a more complete picture.
“One of the things about collections, whether it’s in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, parts of Florida, is that we like to say they talk to each other,” McGillan said. “Sometimes it’s shared topics, sometimes it’s also shared collections.”
Vance-Ali added that it helps localize what the institution of slavery looked like in the different states within the deep South.
“To take just one state and think that somehow relates to how the whole institution operated is short-sighted,” she said.
Ultimately, however, the main goal is to make the documents readily available and free to the public.
“We have scanned these records and we are making them available for free on the internet,” McGillan said. “Anybody with an internet connection, even if it’s just a phone, should be able to access these records. That’s what makes (the ‘Lantern Project’) distinctive.”
Workshop
McGillan and Vance-Ali will be hosting a workshop from noon to 1:30 p.m. Thursday in the meeting room at CLPL.
“It is an opportunity for us to help explain what the project is, showcase the database and guide people through exactly what’s in the database, what those records are,” Vance-Ali said.
They will also touch on what kind of information can be garnered from the different types of documents.
McGillan added that this is the first workshop, but the group is working to add more in the different areas as the project progresses.
Institutions can also request sessions.
The website for the project, which also contains the database is lanternproject.msstate.edu.
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