Chaitra Powell: Week 19 @ The Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum

In my 19^th week at the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum, I worked with Richard Pryor photographs, continued planning for the exhibit, and re-focused my work at the museum.

Our work with the Richard Pryor documentary has given me some hands on exposure to what it means to be an archive. I find myself asking how valuable is our place as a conduit between the creators and the consumers of information. On a philosophical level, I would love for everyone in the world of museums, libraries and archives to earn competitive wages and provide information to the masses for free. Of course this is not the case, my colleagues struggle to find gainful employment in our field and access to information often goes to the highest bidder. Our dealings with the documentary are two fold so far. There are images in our photograph collection that we own the rights to, and we are negotiating a licensing agreement with the producers. Then there are images and articles from Jet and Ebony magazine that they want to source from us. In addition to their licensing fees, how much would Johnson Publishing Company charge to have one of their employees find  every Richard Pryor article or image from 1970 until 1982, and scan it at 1200 dpi? Does this count as research? What is the fee schedule for this type of service? MCLM makes many of these decisions on a case by case basis and it is not up to the archivist, necessarily. I see monetary value in the human resource that located the magazines and made the large file scans, as well as the simple existence of a local source that has what they are looking for. I don’t think many people work in archives for the money, but these are critical items to get a hold over as an independent research institution without an endowment or a consistent funding source.

My dalliance in the world of exhibit planning continues. Over the break I had put together some section ideas for the “Listen, Whitey” exhibit based on the space, the book and my work with Lloyd’s record collection. I even gave the new exhibit a name, “Audio Assault”. When Larry and I sat down to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the initial proposal, he encouraged me to give the idea of black power more of a context, draft a narrative that would walk people through the installation, and identify the main learning outcomes. I spent a great deal of time this week considering his feedback and working on this narrative. Larry also shared with me the planning documents from the museum’s last major exhibition, “Get on Board” detailing the eleven young Freedom Riders who rode a bus from Los Angeles to Houston in attempts to de-segregate the interstate traveling facilities. Two things about these documents encouraged me. One was that the exhibit focused on those young people, many who were still alive and engaged with the museum for the exhibit. This part of the Civil Rights story could best be told in Los Angeles and was very relevant to the community here. The second is that those documents were very similar to the ones that I have been working on for “Audio Assault”. The narrative “Get on Board” piece was ten pages with the Freedom Riders providing the climax of the story, and the design document identified content sections and the visual/audio elements of each one. The rare records and the action in Watts are the parts of the Black Power Movement story that can best be told by MCLM. I have already mapped out visual/audio elements of the exhibit; I just need to format the descriptions to match the industry conventions. I plan to spend the upcoming week digging through the collection to find more pieces to include in the exhibit.

The completion date for “Audio Assault” is February 7^th, which is right around the corner. To this end, I have to be very focused on moving forward with the exhibit, at the expense of all of my other projects. I believe that the MLIS graduate students who are interning at MCLM can move forward with the Online Archives of California (OAC) project. I identified Greta as a point person who can communicate with OAC, Cuadra Star database, and the staff (Cara, Larry and me) about MCLM becoming a contributor and submitting some finding aids. I really regret not being able to commit 100% to this initiative, but Greta is a problem solver and has the technical background to be successful. I put together a binder of everything that I have done so far, mainly composed of sample finding aids for similar collections from other OAC contributors, information about collections that I think would be good candidates for upload, paperwork for becoming a contributor, my Google analytics information, and a log sheet for her to keep records about what she will be able to accomplish. I also relinquished any control over volunteer tasks, including the processing of Mayme’s papers. Lastly, I have let Mr. Woods know that the processing of the LGBTQ collection will not start until the second week of February, at the earliest. I know that I will still be answering questions and be pulled in many directions at the museum, but I hope that my demonstrated “clearing of the plate” will make it easier for me to stay dedicated to the task at hand.   

Moody Moments

The past week at the Maryland State Archives is something of a blur of constant activity book-ended by dull moments while reading 200 year old court records concerning a slave named Robert Moody.

Oral Histories

Under the new terms of my fellowship’s placement at the Maryland State Archives I continue working on oral history interview processing. Although I’ve worked under these terms for four and a half months at Maryland compared to the three months at Chicago for the summer institute, the remote work for The HistoryMakers is a once weekly affair rather than a daily concern so it remains ever fresh in my mind. In order to meet a request from Dr. Ed Papenfuse this past December, an information-dense interview in November, and frequent distractions on my designated day to work on interviews, I fell behind schedule. So in addition to working over break and on weekends, I devoted Monday and Tuesday to polishing one interview and beginning another.

Leah Ward Sears

My (mostly) completed interview is Leah Ward Sears, a judge appointed to the Georgia Supreme Court at the ripe old age of 36. I could tell, simply by the way she talked about the upbringing of her parents and herself, that she placed great importance on family as an institution. This certainly rang true in two important court cases from the Superior Court where she exercised significant independent judgment; one involved parents who disagreed on whether to take their comatose daughter off life support and another case involved a couple who took a weekend to regret forfeiting their child. In the first case she essentially sided with the mother, who wanted to keep the daughter alive, by saying the family needed to agree; the daughter died of natural causes a few days later and the family unit survived. In the adoption case she decided that the father did not relinquish his rights to the child and returned it to the couple. Although proponents of family tend to be on the conservative side of most issues, Sears was quite obviously a liberal. She named her daughter “Brennan” after the US Supreme Court justice because, or so she claimed, “Thurgood” was not a proper name for a girl.

Leah Ward Sears Sears’ emphasis on the family without adopting related political baggage of the family values circle reminded me of my former American history professor, John Sharpless. A colorful man, Sharpless was prone to tangents and told often elaborate stories that always put his classes behind schedule. One such story was his unsuccessful run for Congress in 2000 against (now Senator) Tammy Baldwin. As smirking curmudgeons and astute observers often do, he ran as a moderate of with whatever party he was aligned. During candidate boot camp in Washington, one of the trainers cautioned candidates against using the Republican shibboleth “family values” to rally the faithful. He summarized her remark thusly: “Family is not a value, it’s an institution, and for some people it is sheer hell.” Sears believes in the importance of family as a sanctified and stabilizing force in society, which we must struggle to sustain, but she understands the difference between an institution and values.

Vel Philips

Throughout her interview she emphasized the patience and compassion necessary for the robes and warned viewers of her constant efforts to be worthy of her position. The second interview I’m working on is Vel Philps. She is a prominent judge and politician from Wisconsin and was approximately 83 during the interview. It is clear from the interview that an unexpected remodeling problem at their intended filming spot forced them into a building with heat only high enough to keep the pipe water from freezing. She wears a thick lady’s dress coat and hugs herself for at least three of the five tapes. By the second tape she is visibly drowsy but soldiers on, blaming the cold but admitting that warmth often does the same thing.

Maryland State Archives

On Wednesday the MSA was graced with the presence of a film crew for a genealogical show in the style of "Who Do You Think You Are?" with a celebrity primarily famous for a character in one of the Fox network's earliest and most successful shows. It would be out of place to say who this actor or actress was or describe the brief disruptions caused by their filming in the research room; shooting on location creates unavoidable headaches but I'm nevertheless glad the MSA will be represented on national television.

Wye Island

I resumed examining judicial records from the Scwhweninger Collection. This time I’m examining an 1812 judicial paper concerning a freedom petition by Robert Moody and submitted to the Court of Appeals for the Eastern Shore; Robert Moody’s name only appears in a few pages at the opening and closing of the 60+ page document because it contains literally a dozen exhibits and transcripts from cases dating back to 1793. Moody was using successful suits where no less than twenty slaves freed themselves because they were descended from an Indian native named Moll or Mary. The bulk of the writing could be summarized thusly: Can I have a continuance? Sure. Can I have a continuance? Sure. Can I have a continuance? Sure. No, I never heard of a girl named “Indian Margaret” on Wye Island.

The hope is to find the delicious tidbits. For example, it did not matter that the court heard from a dozen people who claimed to know nothing about a black and Indian mulatto slave--because the mistress of the house admitted that she was. Strangely, she kept this information between herself and the previous owner rather than free her—but whatever. With the exhibits and depositions continuing almost seamlessly into each other, and a complex genealogy unfolded before me, it was difficult to know where one case ended and another began. I constantly reminded myself that every scrap of paper was relevant to Robert Moody’s freedom petition.

Although the jury found that Moody was not a slave, the appeal successfully argued that Moody did not satisfactorily prove he was the son of one of these freed slaves. Strangely, the court allowed the testimony of a mulatto. In the delicate language of their day the clerk slyly described his degree of blackness and hence the credibility of the defense’s objection to him as a witness. According to Maryland law, slaves were not allowed to testify in cases where white people were affected. The judge—and I just LOVED this—stated it was incumbent upon the defense attorney to prove he was a slave.

At close of business on Friday I had not yet found supporting records for his fate. I checked the Queen Anne's County Court Judgment Record series for potential 1813 retrial information but there seems to be none available. Perhaps due to some absent minded book binding over a century ago 1813 may well be misplaced within three volumes spanning the first quarter century of judgments. The year 1812 for example is, bizarrely, placed at the center of a volume spanning 1818-1822; the volume for 1814-1818 is apparently complete but does not possess my needed 1813 judgments. I will need to check for the 1813 judgments in the volume ending in 1811 before I am certain enough to give up my search. The fear that this year may not exist--or that I am checking the record series in error due to the complex legal avenues and jurisdictions in the document--actually kept me awake on Saturday night.

Outreach
 

Kent Island

My first speaking engagements for the Maryland State Archives Legacy of Slavery in Maryland project are looming. I studied a taped presentation given by my colleagues David Armenti and Ryan Cox this summer and was impressed by their grasp of the subject matter and ease of public speaking. For the Progressive Ed Summit, I’ve decided to emphasize how students can use the LOSIM website and teachers can strategically use primary sources to stimulate critical thinking.

During this week I was on something of a creative hot streak. My colleague Tanner consented to the name for our February 5 presentation on Kent Island--“Pistols and Petitions: Queen Anne’s Slave Self-Emancipation in the 19^th Century” and my division colleagues accepted one of two names I proposed for our May 18 presentation—“Know Your Rights: Lost Slaves, Proving Freedom, and Earning Pensions in 19th Century Maryland”; the idea for the latter came to me at the close our LOSIM’s weekly meeting. It was difficult to determine a theme because the only thing our respective topics had in common were petitions; petitions by slaveholders to recover chattel, petitions by slaves for their freedom, and petitions by veterans and widows to earn government pensions for United States Colored Troops service. As the meeting broke up, almost out of nowhere, The Clash came to mind.

At the core of every petition, whether slave, former slave, or slaveholder, the petitioners were exercising their rights under the contemporary law. Although I would like to say my suggested titles were selected because of their quality, I suspect they were chosen simply because I was the first one to offer any. I’ll take what I can get…

Alex Champion--Maryland State Archives

Chaitra Powell: Week 17-18 @ The Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum

Happy New Year, 2013!!

In my first week back at the Mayme Clayton Library and Museum, I did some preliminary investigation of the Online Archives Catalog of California, worked on my Richard Love evaluation, and re-engaged with the volunteers.

Even before I arrived in Los Angeles, my predecessor, Alyss, told me that the museum would benefit from becoming a part of the online digital archive of California. I am very comfortable with this idea because my first foray into archives involved a similar project in Arizona. With the advent of EAD, it only takes a little bit of training for institutions to transform their finding aids into a format that can easily be integrated into a centralized website. These websites are ideal for researchers and provide an extraordinary amount of exposure for small archives. My biggest challenge in becoming a contributor to California’s OAC is producing finding aids that are reflective of the work that has been done and conforms to current archival standards. Most collections have been processed at the item level in the form of inventories. While these make great container lists, more work needs to be done with archival arrangement, scope and content, as well as biographical/historical notes. I don’t necessarily have the time to do the research and contact the donors to obtain the relevant information for every collection. However, I have identified three collections that just need a little bit of tweaking to be ready for submission; The Barryte, Broussard and Dismukes Doll Collection, The CAAGS Collection and The Rex and Roberta Ragan Collection. Hopefully we can breeze through the paperwork and get these materials online within the next few weeks and if I am really lucky, I’ll finish the Mayme Papers and submit the finding aid before the end of the fellowship.

I have been working on my Richard Love HistoryMaker interview for the past couple of weeks. Richard Love is the founder of The Long Beach Times newspaper. He is originally from Hahira, Georgia and spent time in Florida and Colorado before settling in California. Mr. Love is an interesting character, his views on economic development and the racial problems in America are a little intense for my taste, but I respect his contribution to the black community in Long Beach. One example of a controversial opinion that Mr. Love has is that cigarette and alcohol companies should not be the advertisers (sponsors) of important black programs or events. He cites Budweiser as an inappropriate sponsor for the concert to raise money for the United Negro College Fund. As I am processing Mayme’s papers, I can see that the Miller Brewing Company was a sponsor of her independent filmmaker’s grant program for twenty years. The prospect of earning $3,000, $2,000, or $1,000 dollars as a black filmmaker brought information requests flooding through the doors and gave Dr. Clayton a chance to help young people in their creative pursuits. As noble as her cause was, it would not have been lifted off the ground without the support of a beer company and I’m glad that she didn’t refuse in an attempt to maintain an impractical moral high ground.

As soon as we opened the doors on Thursday, January 3, we were responding to phone messages and welcoming our volunteers back to the museum. Michael has made incredible progress on the duplicate book project. I imagine that I will have to break the news on how he needs to break down the 75 boxes that he has emptied over the last month. For now, we’ll keep the shelving and data entry momentum going. As of today we have 25 boxes full of true duplicates. Lena has finished her inventory of the Rex and Roberta Ragan collection and I gave her a template for a finding aid. Adell kept cataloging books and Sandra spent Saturday following up with our new members, thanking them for their donations and asking which size t-shirt they want. Irene and Christal helped us to return the materials from the previous exhibits into their respective homes. I also spoke to Keith about his work at California State University at Northridge which includes a significant amount of photographs from African American photographers. I offered to share his contact information with the Richard Pryor documentary folks because they have some images of the comedian. Keith was also intrigued by the potential “Listen, Whitey” exhibit and offered to help devise some listening stations. Once again, the volunteers are a consistent source of inspiration for why what we do is so important.          

Amanda J. Carter: Week 17-18 (December 22 – January 4) @ Fisk University

Happy New Year!  2013 is finally here and with that this fellowship has only five more months to completion.  My collection is well under way, but I still have much work left to complete.

William McKissack Papers

Upon my return from the Christmas and New Year holiday, I continued to process the Office files series of the William McKissack Papers.  I have resolved the dilemma I discussed in my last post about the index cards with name and contact information.  I have placed the index cards for employees under the Personnel subseries and am placing the index cards of apparent tenant requests under the Properties subseries as “tenant indexes.”  I will explain in the scope and content note or an abstract that the tenant cards appear to be for College Hill, but because of the multiple properties held by the McKissack’s in Nashville and the lack of identifying information linking directly to College Hill, the index cards will remain in the Office files series which contains all materials not related to one specific project.

The remaining Office files materials are processing rather smoothly.  I am on schedule to finish going through all of the boxes by the end of the week.  I hope to be able to make one last pass through this series to add dates and ensure the folders are labeled accurately.  I still have approximately thirty-five more boxes to process and numerous blueprints to clean and process. 

Challenges:
While I have remained on schedule so far in this project, my supervisor Ms. Mattie recently discovered that processing the blueprints takes much longer than we originally estimated so that may inhibit my schedule nearer the end.  It is always a very tricky balance between quality and expediency so that may very well be my most persistent challenge this year.  Now even as I remain on schedule, I cannot forget that there are always impediments waiting so I must be prepared to work as efficiently as I can without sacrificing quality of work.  Fortunately, most of the remaining series are projects that will resemble the College Hill subseries and have its basic structure which may quicken the pace.  

 

Hopefully by next week I will be able to report that the Office files series is completed and that I have moved on to the Hot Springs project.  Have a wonderful week!      

Until next time…

Amanda J. Carter
Franklin Library, Fisk University
IMLS HistoryMakers Fellow 2012-2013

Ardra Whitney: Week 18 @ Avery Research Center

Wednesday, January 2^nd:

Happy New Year! On Wednesday I returned to the Avery Research Center refreshed from my holiday break and ready to get right back into the swing of things. Over the vacation, I began drafting a descriptive summary for the digital photo archive project I had proposed earlier in the year. Hence, when I met with Processing Archivist, Georgette Mayo on Wednesday morning, one of the first things we discussed was the project—well that and 2012’s gripping holiday blockbusters, “Django Unchained,” “The Hobbit” and “The Guilt Trip”. Ms. Mayo explained that in order to display photos online submitted by the public, I would need to get their permission via a photo use request form or policy agreement statement. She also explained that her and Manager of Archival Services, Aaron Spelbring would want to review photo submissions before scanning and posting them in order to choose the most appropriate and relevant images.

Throughout the day I continued working on arrangement, description and finding aid preparation for the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Records. I researched dates for news clippings from the collection that seemed to have none and asked Mr. Spelbring about using cotton twill tape to secure the covers of ledgers, books and other bound items that were coming apart due to age, wear and lack of preservation.

Thursday, January 3^rd:

I continued classifying materials from the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Records in order to create a folder/item list organized by series for the collection’s finding aid. My run in with some painful paper cuts reminded me of the importance of wearing gloves—not only to protect the archival materials, but to protect myself as well. Additionally, I continued my research on collection materials that I had initially deemed miscellaneous. By learning more about the context and value of these materials in relationship to St. Mark’s, the better I am able understand how to describe them for reference and research purposes. For example, I am currently researching the church’s affiliation with the Homebuilders Association of Greater Charleston.

 

 

Friday, January 4^th:

By noon time I had finished a final draft of the descriptive summary for my digital photo archive project and sent it to Ms. Mayo, Mr. Spelbring and Avery’s 2011-2012 IMLS Fellow, Aaisha Haykal, for feedback. Ms. Mayo was the first to chime in with some points for discussion regarding the project, which she said we could talk more about on Monday. I also completed description and arrangement for four out of the nine proposed series of the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Records.

Somehow I think the New Year is inspiring the writing of significantly more fantastic articles on African American history and culture in South Carolina. I did a Google search on Tuesday using the terms “African American history” and “South Carolina,” which returned way more relevant hits than usual. By Friday I had a favorites folder full of articles that I am looking forward to sharing on Avery’s Facebook page.

Dr. Schweninger, I Presume: Maryland Slave Petitions

Dr. Loren Schweninger

This past week I returned to the depths of the Dr. Loren Schweninger Collection. This artificial collection, which I’ve previously talked about, is one of the results of over a decade of research and grant funded support to remove the mask of slave history in government records. The product of this effort at the Maryland State Archives is a scanned microfilm collection of (primarily) court documents concerning free blacks and enslaved Marylanders who challenged enslavement through legal avenues. Although greyscale scans of the microfilm scans are legible, I found that scanning the original documents provided a richer and easier to read picture: All document images in this blog are from these new scans.

At the time the Race and Slavery Petitions Project was launched in 1991, Dr. Loren Schweninger was a member of the Department of History at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The project located, collected, organized, and published all pertinent legislative petitions from the fifteen slave states and the District of Columbia.

Schweninger’s petitions project received multi-year grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. In 2000 the project received a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a Digital Library on American Slavery. Many counties and Baltimore City are expressly cited in the austere Schweninger HTML finding aid but Queen Anne’s County—the subject county of my first presentation this February—is not. The DLAS allows me to selectively choose cases originating from a specific county without examining every image linked in the finding aid.

Dr. Schweninger found fifteen pertinent instances or references to slave petitions in the COURT OF APPEALS (Judgments, Eastern Shore) S380 series alone. Until the Constitution of 1850 (the official printer of its debates was William McNeir, the subject of my last research project) Maryland divided much of its governance between the Eastern and Western Shores because of an archaic custom dating back to colonial period resentments. Although Annapolis was the seat of state government, offices like the Treasurer and the Court of Appeals had separate jurisdictions for each side of the bay. By using the DLAS I was brought to “George Walls v. Henny Hemsley and her children” in series S380. The preliminary description and citation of the case was intriguing but ultimately misleading. Filed on May 1, 1815, the petition description reads:

“Henny Hemsley and her children state they are unjustly held in slavery by George Walls, who is currently in Maryland, but who is a resident of Kentucky. The petitioners claim they are entitled to their freedom because they are ‘descended on the female line from a free woman named Susan.’”

Upon examining the source I realized the petition was a ghost. The original petition, unfound or perhaps lost, existed with other documents as a transcript in series S380 for the June term 1817. Since the transcript carried full legal weight, any distinction between the original petition and the transcript was moot. Besides, this transcript summarized several documents probably otherwise trapped inside the QUEEN ANNE’S COUNTY COURT (Judgments) or (Judgment Record) series. The DLAS indicated that the petition was “granted; appealed; reversed; affirmed”; I interpreted this to mean the freedom petition was granted, appealed by George Walls, reversed by the Court of Appeals, and then reaffirmed following the slave Hemsley’s own appeal.

The story given in the petition was, to say the least, astounding and horrifying.

Henny Hemsley was a mulatto slave with three children. In 1815 Hemsley's counsel William Carmichael petitioned the Queen Anne's County Court to release her and her family of bondage to George Walls of Kentucky. Hemsley's petition claimed that she and her daughters Susan, Juliana, and Priscilla were "descended on the female line from a free woman named Susan" and, since slave status was passed matrinlineally, entitled to their freedom. The case hinged on the testimony of witnesses Greenberry Griffin and John Denny.

Greenberry Griffin gave testimony of how the elder Susan was illegally enslaved. In the weeks leading to the surrender of British forces at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, Griffin travelled with Captain James Sweat to the James and York rivers in Virginia. Following the surrender, Griffin saw Susan "selling cakes and beer without controul" at the Gosport Shipyard and thereafter repeatedly on the shore of the York River until Captain Sweat left the area. Several men took Susan aboard Sweat's vessel and sold her to him; she was a replacement for another black woman who was released because of her "cries and screams." Captain Sweat informed her that he would make her his wife. She protested the kidnapping and claimed she was a free woman and already married to a white man in Virginia. Although Griffin testified that he did not remember sharing this story with other persons, he admitted hearing others talk about it.

These snippets describe Captain Sweat's motives for the kidnapping and Susan's protests

A second witness named John Denny lived in the immediate neighborhood of Captain Sweat and, since Captain Sweat and his brother Bartus were deceased, testified to what the community knew of Susan. He recalled hearing Susan telling his mother that she was "free in Virginia and to have been stolen from thence by Captain Sweat." Upon being asked if Susan's kidnapping was common knowledge, Denny claimed it was the "reputations of the neighbourhood that...Susan was a free woman."



"Judg.t Reversed on 1.st Exception and aff.d on 2.nd June Term 1817"

The jurors ruled in Hemsley's favor. Walls' counsel made two exceptions and appealed the decision on the grounds that the judge 1) allowed John Denny to use neighborhood gossip regarding Susan in his testimony and 2) did not allow declarations by Susan's deceased owner John Gibson to be admitted as evidence. The Court of Appeals for the Eastern Shore affirmed the Queen Anne's County Court's decision regarding the former owner Gibson but reversed the decision regarding Captain Sweat's neighbor, Denny. It ordered a "new trial...in the same manner as if no trial had taken place or any appeal had been prosecuted." After checking the recto of the judgment transcript I immediately realized that the “…reversed; affirmed” description provided by the Digital Library on American Slavery referred to these two exceptions and not the ultimate verdict. That meant Hemsley and her daughters may well have been freed!

Unfortunately I did not find information confirming nor denying that the Hemsleys were freed. I found no census information of other corroborating sources for them, Captain Sweat, George Walls, or Susan’s former owner John Gibson nor an account of this new trial in the Queen Anne’s County Court series. Since an index for the court does not exist, I scanned individual court dockets for every term from October 1817 to October 1819; I found nothing. I chose a new tack and looked for manumission records instead. I found nothing in the land records where manumissions were often recorded. Fortunately I remembered that Queen Anne’s is one of four counties that have a freedom records index. The freedom records indices span several record types covering manumissions written in state records, wills, land records, and Certificates of Freedom; the Certificates of Freedom were applied for by free colored persons who wanted proof that they were not slaves; such a document would have prevented or ended Susan’s captivity by Captain Sweat. Index 39 had certificate citations for Henny and her daughters Juliana and Priscilla. Henny successfully applied for one on April 30, 1836 and her daughters followed up on May 13.

From these certificates I learned that Henny was not even five feet tall and, despite being described as a “mulatto” (their emphasis) in the Court of Appeals transcript, she was nevertheless called “dark.” Her daughters were similarly short but described as “light.” Priscilla had a scar on her forehead and another on her right ankle “occasioned by a burn.” Given their ages at application time I learned that Henny was probably born in 1791, Juliana in 1814, and Priscilla (called “Priscy” in her record) in 1815—the same year Henny petitioned for freedom. I found no such certificate for her daughter Susan but, since her name seems to always precede her siblings’, I suspect she was the eldest.

There were a number of gaps in the narrative that I am sorry I cannot fill. Given the record keeping practices of the time or twists of fate, I know nothing of Captain Sweat and Henny’s mother Susan beyond the Court of Appeals transcript. The Certificates of Freedom state the Hemsleys were freed on May 1, 1818—the first term of the Queen Anne’s County Court—but I found no record that the retrial ever took place. With a specific date in hand I checked the May 1818 docket a third time but still found nothing.

Census information for the Hemsleys was difficult to find because, as women, their identities were obfuscated by the socio-sexual conventions of the 19^th century. Until 1850, censuses only recorded the head of the household’s name and the number of other persons by age, sex, and caste (i.e. slave or free). The only ways I could quickly locate Henny and her daughters were if I knew the name of any husbands they had or they never married at all. There was never a reference to Henny’s paternity. Given Captain Sweat’s intention to make Susan his wife I could have ruled him in or out if he died after or before Henny’s birth year. The paternity of Henny’s daughters is almost certainly white.

Perhaps to ameliorate my disgust for the chain of events that brought Henny to the Court of Appeals I imagine she had a consensual arrangement with her owner but, upon his death or insolvency, petitioned for her and her children’s freedom so they would not leave their home state. I cannot prove this of course but it is a more pleasant scenario.

Alex Champion--Maryland State Archives

Ardra Whitney: Week 16 @ Avery Research Center

Monday, December 17^th:

While finishing up my survey of materials from the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Records, I discovered a large register from the parish (folio) containing names and dates for baptisms, confirmations, marriages and burials. The first entries dated all the way back to 1866—one year after the church was founded. Additionally, I learned from speaking with Processing Archivist, Georgette Mayo and looking at the collection’s deed of gift that Avery’s former associate director, Leila Potts-Campbell authorized the agreement between donor, Rev. Daniel J. Messier and the repository. Potts-Campbell is the daughter of the late John Potts, who was principal of Avery and presided over its transition from private institute to public school, beginning in 1947 until its closing in 1954.

Tuesday, December 18^th:

Using folders from the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Records that contained information pertaining to the church’s history and architecture, I began drafting the historical note for the collection’s finding aid. I also reviewed notes I took during my initial survey of the collection that enabled me to begin developing the finding aids’ scope and content note and establish a system of arrangement, i.e. series and folders. What’s more, I came across a manual published by the South Carolina State Historical Records Advisory Board on managing religious archives located in my office desk. The manual is sure to be a great help to me in describing the various types of materials present in the collection, as well as providing the appropriate retention periods and storage of the collection’s records.

Wednesday, December 19^th - Friday, December 21^st:

With Ms. Mayo and Assistant Director, Deborah Wright’s permission, I worked from home in order to recover from foot surgery. Before going for the surgery on Tuesday, I made sure to make copies of documents from the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Records’ donor file that would allow me to continue my work on the collection’s finding aid—namely an inventory of the collection that had been prepared prior to my survey of it, as well as further information on the church’s history and architecture. For the remainder of the week I kept my feet iced, wrapped and elevated, as I worked on evaluating the video oral history interview for veteran filmmaker, Stanley Nelson. One of the things that Nelson said during his interview that stayed with regard to his documentary film work is that you have to figure out how to go to the next project while still working on your current project. I thought that was great advice; considering that each IMLS Fellow, as Chaitra’s recent post points out, will be on the hunt for their next professional or academic endeavor in 2013.

 

(Charleston, SC --> New York, NY)

A view from my Friday morning flight home for the holiday break.