In a sense the staff members were correct: they really did not have that information, especially if the visitor meant information on the specific people who lived at that location. In many locations, not even the names of the enslaved have survived, although, for 19th-century locations, and for many 17th and 18th century ones, the names of the enslaved were recorded in the probate/estate inventories of their owners. Finding enslaved ancestors can be extremely difficult and requires a great deal of research that historic site staff may not have the time or resources to do.
However, it is very possible to find out about the lives of enslaved people in the aggregate, and the details of their lives. One of the first examples of this kind of research is historian Lorena Walsh's book,
From Calabar to Carter's Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community, published in 1997 by the University of Virginia Press. Lorena studied existing legal records, family papers, archaeology, newspaper advertisements and other documentation to construct the history of this community. In the 17 years since the book was first published, other historians have done similar work.
In 1989, at the reconstructed Carter's Grove Slave Quarter, I worked with other curatorial staff members at Colonial Williamsburg to furnish interiors that reflected the types of objects that enslaved women and men lived with at various economic levels within the slave community. For the thousands of visitors, both black and white, who visited the site before it was closed in 2002, it was a revealing look at how the legal status of enslavement was not necessarily reflected in their material culture.
Today, with the kinds of digitized information utilized by the Oak Alley staff, it is very possible to know more about the real people who lived at these sites. But it still takes time, effort and, most of all, funding, to do the work!
List members may be interested in two new books that will be published this month by Rowman & Littlefield in cooperation with AASLH:
Interpreting Slavery at Museum and Historic Sites by Kristin L. Gallas and James DeWolf Perry, and
Interpreting African American History and Culture at Museums and Historic Sites, edited by Max van Balgooy. Shameless self-promotion: I wrote a chapter on furnishing period rooms of both enslaved and free African Americans as a tool in interpreting their lives.
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Martha Katz-Hyman
Curator
Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation
Williamsburg VA
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