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Hines' Jazz Archive to Berkeley
Dec 9, 2009
Campus musicians receive gift from pianist Earl Hines' estate

Moreland-Springarn Research Center
Nov 11, 2009
Allegations that the research center could close due to an inadequate budget

Black Educator's papers to Emory
Oct 15, 2009
Ulysses S. Byas Was First Post-Desegregation Black School Superintendent

Shakur papers to Woodruff Library
Oct 9, 2009
Tupac's mother donates his writing for research

Octavia Butler collection
Oct 7, 2009
Huntington receives sci-fi writer Octavia Butler's collection

New Orleans slave records

Feb 18, 2009

 

by Janet McConnaughey

(Source: The Associated Press, Thursday February 12, 2009, 8:14 AM)

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Records of more than 30,000 slaves shipped to New Orleans, copies of more than 20,000 letters to and from Abraham Lincoln, and records of 4.2 million Civil War soldiers are going online for the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth.

Most will be available only to Ancestry.com's 925,000 paying subscribers, but the Lincoln letters and speeches, provided by the Library of Congress, will be free.

An index of the slave manifests also will be free, once volunteers have created it from the scanned images being added to the site today, said Gary Gibb, vice president for content for the family of sites.

That will be extremely valuable to historians as well as people interested in their family history, said Christopher Harter, director of library and reference services at the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University's African-American history archive.

"It's one thing to digitize and put the image up on the Web. But it's of far greater value to have the information transcribed and searchable by those who are doing the research," he said.

The manifests, from 1810 through 1860, "document the movement of slaves from the mid-Atlantic states to the Deep South because of the cotton gin and the need for millions of slaves to work the cotton fields," said Lisa Arnold, Ancestry.com's expert in African-American genealogy.

There are three documents for each ship, including the shipmaster's signed statement that he is not importing slaves -- a practice that Congress banned in 1808.

"He's putting his name on the line that he's not importing them, simply shipping them from one port in the United States to another," she said.

Because the number on each ship varied, she didn't know exactly how many slaves were involved but estimated the number was between 30,000 and 50,000.