I’ll
be brief for this go-around. Most of my time at the Maryland State Archives has
revolved around census data stripping and preliminary research and verification
of a research collection.
The
basic activity that all Legacy of Slavery in Maryland research archivists
undergo is data stripping. We examine censuses for the Eastern Shore between
1830 and 1880 and enter the information into one of over a dozen LOSIM data
tables. Although the 1880 censuses have more content, the activity itself is
not especially stimulating unless my imagination runs away with me. “Hmm,” my
mind mutters with interest, “one parent is described as mulatto and the other
is black yet—unlike other times this census taker encountered this
combination—the children are also described as mulatto. The parents must be a
very light mulatto or black.” I imagine the scandals that must have happened
when a 45 year old woman with three children is married to a man just four
years older than her eldest son, take pride in the black male with a profession
other than “Laborer” and the female with a job other than “Keeping House” or
“Domestic Servant,” and ridicule obvious errors or contemporary writing
conventions; some favorite examples include misspelling “cousin,” free use of
terms like “Idiotic,” and calling stepchildren “in law[s]”.
My
predecessor Krystal did a similar activity with the Maryland Colonization
Society records in addition to the census. The MCS was also her source for case
studies and biographies. Although she wrote a total of sixty-one case studies,
I have yet to write a single one. Thankfully, a new computer seems to have
allayed tech support’s reluctance to do too much work on a computer destined
for the recycling bin. Unlike Krystal I do not have a specific project beyond
the general work that many of my peers engage in; it seems I need to advocate
for myself and find one. In the meantime I was pointed to the Schweninger
Collection, an artificial collection of digitized research material pertaining
to legal petitions involving slaves. Petitions range from slaves in the middle
of a probate dispute up to slaves petitioning for freedom. Stay tuned…
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