Richard Cox did a very interesting session on this resource, and I would urge all to take a look. It's one of our most heavily used resources, around 300,000 hits per year, mostly by users outside of the University. https://library.uncg.edu/slavery/ is the main website and the largest portion is the Race and Slavery Petitions Project - used heavily by African American (and other) genealogists and researchers on the history of slavery. The online source is an index but we also have microfilm of the actual handwritten petitions (the title is Race, Slavery and Free Blacks) - there's a guide in the Ref collection at E441 .R280 and the Film numbers are 5294 and 4939. We are one of the few libraries in the country that owns the entire set - most locations have the records only for their own states. It's a tricky set to use because you need to use the PAR number which is explained in depth in the print volumes, Essentially, you must have the state and the year from the online index to find them easily. We do appear to have online access to these through Proquest's History Vault and it is listed on the Database list under Slavery and the Law Digital Archive. The best way to search there is petition number.
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ReplyDeleteAdditionally, as I learned from a very difficult patron question my first week here, once you have the petition number you can usually locate a .pdf of the document in the Slavery and the Law Digital Archive database (https://library.uncg.edu/dbs/auth/go.asp?vdbID=879) by just entering the number into the search field. (I think this is the ProQuest one, fyi)
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