55.5 F
Wrightsville Beach
Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Uncovering the past, informing the future

Must read

What began as a school assignment morphed into a project preserving a forgotten piece of New Hanover County’s story by giving tens of thousands of slaves a claim in history.

So far, students turned archivists Christine Ingram Hockaday and Billy Koch have documented only a fraction of the county’s enslaved population using property records stored in dozens of books in the register of deed’s office.

“It’s been hiding in plain sight, literally,” Hockaday said. “We have over 13,000 human beings that lived in New Hanover County that weren’t talked about, weren’t looked at, weren’t named. We’ve been able to bring them to light.”

Hockaday and Koch discovered a passion for the work during Cape Fear Community College professor James Burke’s critical thinking course in July 2013, when students were directed to pore over dozens of deed books dating back to 1734 to find and record references of slave sale transactions. The flowery old script was indecipherable to some students, but Hockaday and Koch found themselves staying after class to dig through the records and uncover a history neglected for centuries.

By the end of the summer, the class recorded 1,323 transactions in a simple database that was published and distributed to local libraries, but a federal work-study program enabled Hockaday and Koch to keep working, capturing additional details and culling transactions from the rest of the colonial period through 1820 to create the first installment of “The Slave Deeds of New Hanover County,” published in April.

Hockaday and Koch are only halfway through the county deed books, but their pursuit has led them to look at wills and runaway slave advertisements with plans to investigate death records, coroner reports, apprenticeship bonds, estate records and more — and their goals do not end there.

The pair also hopes to expand the reach of the project beyond New Hanover County by digging through the deeds and legal records of Brunswick, Pender, Duplin, Bladen, Columbus, Sampson and Onslow counties, ultimately compiling a free, searchable database of all enslaved people in the Cape Fear region.

“We’re really only getting a small picture of slavery in this region, and we want more,” Hockaday said.

With such big ambitions, Hockaday and Koch are working to secure support by traveling around the state to talk about the project, now called Let It Be Known, and applying for grants while they continue to collect records.

A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, if awarded, will supply funds to vamp up the project’s website with expanded research and analysis of the data.
Realizing they have more work cut out for them than two dedicated, passionate people can tackle, Hockaday and Koch are applying for a second grant from the humanities endowment to train a network of citizen archivists through courses at Cape Fear Community College.

“There’s a ton of data still out there, and right now it’s just the two of us,” Koch said.

Archivists will be able to work from home to collect data from digitized sources. Koch and Hockaday listed a string of characteristics a successful archivist must exhibit: attention to detail, patience, perseverance, and above all, passion for work that is both profoundly terrible and surprisingly uplifting.

There are more uplifting stories than one might think. After all, Koch noted, the first record the group found in the county deed books was the emancipation of a slave, Toney, on March 22, 1734.

“That starts it out with hope,” Koch said, who cited other stories of compassion chronicled in the database. “We hold on to those things.”

For Hockaday and Koch, the work of reclaiming the past has shaped their future in previously unforeseeable ways. Both plan to invest a minimum of 10 or 20 years to see the project to completion.

Hockaday was pursuing a career in social work when she signed up for Burke’s critical thinking class last year. Now she is an undergraduate history major at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who plans to spend her career in public history and library services.

“All of a sudden, I fell in love with it. Not only did I fall in love with the project, but with local history in general,” Hockaday said. “My projected future has completely changed because of this.”

email [email protected]

- Advertisement -spot_img

More articles

- Advertisement -spot_img

Latest articles