 Thank you all for coming today. I have been informed that it would be wise to ask all of you to silence your cell phones during this flight Dr. Sauer who is scheduled to speak first is actually running a few minutes late So if it's all right with you, we'll be inverting some items on the agenda and moving directly to my own remarks My name is Giovanni Ruffini. I am a professor of history and classical studies director of the classical studies program The reason why the classical studies program is hosting this event may not be immediately obvious But hopefully we'll become clear in the next few minutes It has been just over a year now since Vince Rosevac died Near the end of his 53rd year as a professor in our classical studies program Now anyone whose career reaches that advanced stage I think we'll have many stories told about him many of those stories apocryphal unlikely some of them even suspicious and As we gather here today to celebrate the launch of the Fairfield slavery project I think of two of those apocryphal stories in particular that I would like to share with you today now as with so many Apocryphal stories, they may have some grain of truth to them and are in any case too good to be thrown out so Here we go The first story actually goes back several decades I think long before most of you were here to a time when Vince still kept an office at the end of the history department hallway on the third floor of Canisius While he was not a member of the history department Vince always considered himself an historian he was justifiably proud of his research and writing as an historian and Perhaps unkindly was critical of his colleagues who put less emphasis on the research and writing side of their work background music According to the first apocryphal story that I've received from the traditions of our elders in the middle of a fight Because he had a few of those With our department's former US colonial historian Vince stormed off in a huff Announcing and I quote if none of you are willing to research local colonial history. I'll do it myself Unquote Now Vince as always was true to his word and the result was a series of articles on Colonial Connecticut published in the mid 1990s Including two on slaves and slavery in Connecticut There the matter sat for quite a while when I first got to know Vince 10 11 years ago His interest in slavery was was in the rear-view mirror Not quite out of sight. He always imagined he would find time to come back to it later at some point And and this is how we get to the second apocryphal story about Vince Roosevelt a much more recent one In which Vince is reported to have walked into the provost's office and handed Mary Francis Malone a very large paper bag full of cash and And said I want to start a research fund and Gave her all the cash and This project was born Olivia and Alec have been living off of that paper bag of cash for a year and a half now So well done kids And let me just say how lucky and blessed that Vince was to find them to such talented smart hard-working students Who invested so deeply in his work that they would not let it die when he did That they dedicated a year of their lives to continuing what they had all started together To see it to fruition here today May we all be so lucky to have people like them in our lives one day Olivia and Alec. Thank you Some day. I think Vince somewhere is smiling down at this right now now our first speaker has arrived Dr. Glenn Sauer from the Dean's office sir the floor is yours Thank you. Thank you Giovanni and thank you all for coming. I'm Glenn Sauer I'm in the College of Arts and Sciences Dean's office, and I'm just here to welcome you all You know Giovanni has told you many things already about Vin You know, I didn't know Vincent that well although I served with him on committees over the years But I didn't really know him personally, but I did I was so I was a little bit surprised To see that he was involved in a slavery project that great that dates back as I understand to the 80s But when I think about Vin and what I do know about him What always struck me about him was his integrity and the moral authority with which he spoke with at faculty meetings and committee meetings and in general and he was always very Outspoken advocate for faculty rights for workers rights both on campus and off campus So in retrospect It's not too surprising that he would also have an interest in workers that had no rights Going back to the times of the slavery and so that perhaps is what led him to initiate this project And I'm very glad you're here to share in it today And just once again Welcome and thank you again to Vin students who have carried this forward Thanks Without any further ado the students of the faculty student collaborative research project Olivia and Alec Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for coming. My name is Olivia and I'm Alec and we are so very honored and excited to Share it with you all the launch of the Vincent J. Rosevick register of slaves in Fairfield, Connecticut So the purpose of this project has always been multifaceted Dr. Rosevick's goal was to fill in the blanks of history that writers had left out first and foremost He wanted to create a database that would allow for the descendants of Fairfield slaves to Explore their heritage this meant collecting as many records as possible of the town's resident slaves and organizing them as people not property He hoped that as a result of this reorganization, we would be able to create real and meaningful family trees I am happy to say that we have reconstructed quite a few families in this database But dr. Rosevick are always understood the implications of this project The data that we have amassed tells the story of a town that relied much more heavily on slavery than was previously thought This register has collected records of hundreds of slaves, which had previously been unrecognized by history And so we wanted to start by taking you through a brief history of the project The image on the left is the title page of a talk called slavery in Fairfield at the end of the colonial period And this talk was given to the Fairfield Historical Society by dr. Rosevick in 1992 And this was the original presentation that kick-started this project Focused specifically on the time period of 1760 to 1790 here in Fairfield In what dr. Rosevick called quote principally a selective but somewhat detailed examination of Three different categories of historical sources to show that some of the different kinds of information Which these sources can provide about slaves and slavery here in Fairfield Those sources were census data probate data and general knowledge about the social structure of Connecticut some 27 years later Excuse me this presentation has been brought to this present-day research form over time further research into church records Property records newspaper advertisements military records and other types of archives surmounted into the creation of a catalog of 1100 entries that we were able to condense into This data Some of the data points you see in front of you our final estimate is that there are 897 slaves in our database and 392 households and at this point It's important to just clarify some of the terms we'll be using to describe somebody who was enslaved in Fairfield at that During this time period we'll use the slaves or individuals and the slave owners. We will call households throughout the rest of the project The database also features 947 slave to household relationships and essentially what that is is When we were able to find an indication that that slave was owned by a particular person or group of persons who lived in Fairfield And it also accounts for if a slave moved between households at various points throughout their own life Some other important Facts and figures I guess are that there are 472 males and 403 females in our database in addition to like 27 Entries that we weren't able to find information based off of what we had what their gender was Which was interesting for Alec and I to like consider because it was pretty 5050 And something that was very important to us throughout the project is the misconceptions about northern slavery As opposed to southern slavery what people tend to think about in slavery in general is what they think about for the south and They tend to write off the fact that there was slavery in the north and a part of the research that Alec and I were doing was figuring out those Tenements that slavery was built upon in the north as well One of which we found interestingly enough was that they had a rather equal ratio of male to female slaves or in the south It tended to be more male oriented And when we get into the database a bit later these circles are interesting and everything But you'll be able to see the data play out in real time in our database as well So a little bit of history about Fairfield and slavery in Fairfield Fairfield's history of slavery is nearly as long as Fairfield's history itself It was founded in 1639 and originally stretched from Redding at its northernmost the Saga Tuck River at its west and Black Rock at its east over the next few centuries Fairfield broke into a number of other towns namely Redding Westport and Weston And as you can see this is a map that I Personally altered so that you could see the different boundaries and at the top you have Redding that orange shape That breaks off from Fairfield in 1767 then lower down you have Northfield which turns into Weston and Easton and that breaks off from Fairfield in 1787 and then everything lower than that with the green lines around it is what we have been considered considering Fairfield from 1639 to 1848 which is Fairfield's founding to the ending of slavery in Connecticut This also includes Westport Westport didn't break off Until essentially all of the slaves in Fairfield had been freed So slavery in Fairfield really gets its start Right after King Philip's war Which was fought between European settlers in an alliance of American Indians Fairfield's first slaves were likely prisoners of war and their families throughout the database There are scattered entries of Native American slaves men women and children Appearing close to the end of this conflict in 1770 in 1678 Then slavery hits its peak in the mid 1700s Most of the records in this database come from between 1730 and 1780 and this cluster of records made it originally difficult to figure out the number and Demographics of the slaves in Fairfield because the first US census wasn't until 1790 and it was flawed at best Then later on in 1779 there was a petition written by two of Fairfield slaves named Prince and Prime And they were petitioning for the end to slavery in Connecticut. There was no action on this until 1784 when Connecticut passed a gradual emancipation law what this did was a allowed for Female slaves who were born after 1784 to be freed when they turned 21 and male slaves to be freed when they turned 25 However, there were some other stipulations slaves who were ill could not be freed because they would then become a burden on the town and Slaves over the age of 45 were not allowed to be freed because they were considered too old to work Likewise a burden on society Then by about 1820 Most of Fairfield slaves were free though a few white slave owners held on to their human property and In 1848 Connecticut finally passed complete emancipation slavery in Connecticut was done So just a little bit about our resources. We really can't talk about all of this without it We went into a lot of very very different resources, but the most important ones were probate records church records from a number of local parishes and Donald Lyons Jacobus Genealogists from Connecticut his book history and genealogy of the families of old Fairfield So I want to talk about the probate records first So for those of you who don't know probate is Generally speaking three different types of documents wills inventories of estates and distributions of those estates to the heirs of a person who is deceased and In these documents that we were looking through slaves would not be listed as people but as the property being transferred from one slave owner to another and So what we were doing is basically going through each of these sources and pulling out pieces of property and listing them as people Now each of these people typically has a certain value ascribed to them and Some descriptors including Negro girl Negro wench stuff like that And so we would do our best to try and figure out how these people were connected and so on Church records were equally as important So the parishes of Fairfield greens farm Stratfield Greenfield Hill and a few others kept records of residents births deaths Baptisms and marriages in many cases the individual who made note of these events would explicitly say that the subject of the writing was a slave owned by a specific person in Fairfield Slaves like other people in Fairfield were allowed to be married and even baptized However, these records can be muddled in naming practices of the time for this reason It's often difficult to determine whether certain individuals are Free or enslaved because slaves and a lot of recently freed slaves did not have last names And then lastly Donald Lines Jacobus this genealogist that I just mentioned His book which was published in the earlier half of the 20th century History and genealogy of the families of old Fairfield. Yes, we have a physical copy right here Compiled extensive genealogical trees of many of the prominent families of Fairfield This book was invaluable to us as a research team as we tried to identify who specific slave owners were and As we were going through this we of course came across the issue that This book only listed white Residents of Fairfield for the most part So the book generally excludes non-white residents except for a few in note sections and Women are listed in this book only as the wives and daughters of an individual entry So this book provides a wealth of information for us as we were trying to figure out who these people were But it didn't tell the whole story This next slide just shows some images of the primary source documents we used plus the cover of Jacobus's book But the next thing that we wanted to do was talk about our methodologies and what we were specifically looking for in those sources That Alec just was talking about as Alec mentioned We were using a variety of different primary sources It to aid in our research these documents could be quite overwhelming on first glance like those are kind of really hard to read And it became clear to us once we knew what we were looking for and we wanted to share some of those things with you today some of the things that we would be looking for in our research of primary sources included the name of the slave if applicable the slaves household Their value any birth death baptism marriage information if it came from a church record And then citations for where this information is found by far the most important thing we were looking for It was also important for us to know any records of movement of the slaves any interesting notes in the distribution And those would all go in like a note section and once completed a record it would look something like this So the picture on the screen you see right now is the inventory of Abraham Morehouse in 1761 and as you look at the screen where the arrow is pointing you can see that It's pointing at an entry called Negro girl named Dinah 30 pounds, but she's not the only slave listed in the inventory if you look on the line above Negro wench 20 pounds next to her Negro girl Jenny 28 pounds maybe 28 Negro girl called Nancy and Negro boy called Jack So that group of five were the slave slaves of Abraham Morehouse that he listed in his inventory This was the information that we would compile for Dinah Including any baptism the baptism record we have from the Fairfield Congregational Church In the will of Abraham Morehouse, which is not pictured here. It states that he bequeaths, which means give Dinah to his daughter Rebecca and then the citations and then What this all translates into is the following entry So this is our database And this is what Dinah's entry looks like the catalog number is something that Alec and I used to kind of keep track of our own records Dinah was owned by three different people She has three different catalog numbers to make sure that we had all of that information When we were condensing it into this one database She's a female and then all of those same notes plus a couple of more from the other entries are listed there as well As the story of Dinah which we'll talk about a bit later And then this part down here is the really interesting part about our database I would argue Her husband her children and her house the households of what she was a part of are all able to be linked to Dinah's one entry in our database and Then if you're interested in learning more about those people they link directly to each other So they're all looped into each other and you can explore families As easy as the click of the mouse, which I think is pretty cool Let's see where is cool Yes, awesome, and so that was one half of our methodology Data collection and how it came into the catalog the other half was the households as Alec already mentioned Donald's on Jacobus did a lot of this work for us So it was mostly just finding the citations in his sources and making sure we were connecting the right people to the right slaves In the example of Abraham Morehouse to continue Dinah's little story We knew it had to be an Abraham Morehouse who died in 1761 that first red circle up at the top is our first context clue in Abraham Morehouse's entry and this is a screenshot of Jacobus. I forgot to mention that The second context clue we really had was that he bequeathed Dinah to his daughter Rebecca Who married Matthew Jennings which you can see in the second circle is listed also right there So with that information we were able to conclude that this was the right Abraham Morehouse And we came up with our own little code to identify that this is Jacobus book to page 667 line number nine so we could find very specifically where it was in Donaldine Jacobus's book the catalog number as I just mentioned is us cross-referencing making sure that all of the information Got into the database And all of the proper slaves were attributed to the proper households and then like with Dinah This is what that entry looks like Like I said Donaldine Jacobus did a lot of the work for us So we direct you to a book to page 667 line 9 to get more information and it also links all of the slaves just like it did in the how in the slave side of the database And this might seem confusing and overwhelming But we have laptops that you're more than welcome to explore during our reception at the end So you guys can explore through the database as well Cool that being said This is our database It lives at digitalhumanities.fairfield.edu slash slavery And this is the first page when you enter into our database The image in the background is a woman named Nancy Tony who is actually a slave that we found in Fairfield and this is a portrait of her which I think is pretty interesting It lives in a school in Wilton, I believe Windsor. I always get that wrong And there are very there are several ways in which you can explore our database The first as I mentioned was the slave side of thing if you know the name of a slave You're looking for you can search them in the search bar or just go through our pages 892 it might be easier to use a search bar And then the same thing with the households if it's a woman who we know who they married Will include their former name as well in case the slave was listed under that information in the primary source You may be looking at or someone in the future may be looking at The other way if you just want to explore Is to go to our graph This is a really awesome tool that's not loading. Ah, there it is. Okay This is a really awesome tool That Robert Hoyt in the library helped us to create and it is family mapping essentially of all of the families and the Slaves that we had so if I scroll out scroll out You will see all 892 individuals you can move throughout the database And if you zoom in you can also see different family units. I picked a scary one There we go. That one looks nice. So the blue lines are children attached to parents and the red lines are Individuals who are married to each other and the same thing applies if you're interested in learning a bit more about Edward You can click on it and get directly to his information So that's a little bit about our database And we the next thing we wanted to do was share a couple of the stories because there are so many Just share a couple of the stories with you all of Some important particular stories, but I'll let Alex start with that one So the slave that we were just looking at Dinah is a particularly interesting entry in this database Bishi is completely unique to this particular group So Dinah was baptized at around the age of five on January 15th in Fairfield January 15th 1753 at this time and For the next eight years Dinah was a slave to Abraham Morehouse when Morehouse died She was bequeathed to his daughter Rebecca Jennings and valued at 30 pounds Dinah reappears over 50 years later in the estate of Rebecca Jennings on April 2nd 1812 Dinah was emancipated at the age of 64 According to Rebecca Jennings She was influenced by the strong desire of Dinah and in consideration of her long and faithful services and of the sum of one dollar by her time in hand paid but To emancipate Dinah, but these circumstances are very very strange Dinah was nearly 20 years older than the maximum age for Emancipation by law slaves older than 45 could not be emancipated because they would become a burden on the town So with this in mind It's likely that Dinah had somehow proven that she would be able to support herself or that someone else would be supporting her But it gets even stranger When Rebecca Jennings wrote her will She had no direct heirs all of them had either died or had moved away Dinah and her descendants were all that was left Dinah had four living children and two grandchildren What Jennings did was completely unprecedented in this database Dinah her children Pompey Nancy Pegg and Amos were each given one-sixth of Jennings entire estate The children of her daughter Priscilla and Priscilla named Edwin and Priscilla were each given a twelfth of the estate One of the possible reasons for this was the relationship between Dinah and Rebecca Slave and owner had lived with each other their entire lives Dinah was born when Rebecca Jennings was just 12 the two grew up together So perhaps there was a friendship between the two in some strange sense of the word The next story that we wanted to share was one of our favorites the story of Tim and Lil Unlike most of Fairfield slaves. There is a long paper trail of regarding Tim's history We have Tim's baptismal records. We have his original owner And in 1772 that original owner William Bennett died and he bequeathed Tim to his wife Abigail Where Tim is listed as a boy. So we know that this is the beginning of the story because he's listed as a boy He was then given to the son of William and Abigail captain Joseph Bennett And in February of 1791 Tim married another slave named Lil Who was a slave of Ashael Disbrow in the very same church that Tim was baptized in 26 years earlier? Together Tim and Lil had five children Nancy William Ward Iyer and twins Amos and Allman But for nearly three years the family lived separated from each other because they were owned by two different families However, three years into their marriage Lil and William Ward were sold into the Bennett household from the Disbrow household and in 1799 Tim and Lil were emancipated And they left Fairfield for Delhi, New York, and this is where a lot of their information comes from In 1999 historian named Diane Cessone Wrote an article about Tim and Lil Bennett as they were known in Delhi, New York called journeys of freedom and a long long history of the Bennett's in Delhi, New York were able to be Indicated through that they had a grocer in their family. They had somebody who made the local cemetery in their family But from their move to Delhi this all of this information was able to come about We think that they're a particularly interesting story in our case because while we know a lot about what happened after they left Fairfield our research also was able to find Tim's parents None given and Harry none given is what we call people who we don't have enough information to give them a name in the database But through our research we were able to find that that was the connection of Tim So we were able to trace as opposed to what Cessone did in 1999 trace the family for we were able to trace the family back one More generation which we thought was pretty cool Let's go to the next one So the another slate that I want to talk about is Jack Roland So Jack his name was not originally Roland Roland was some mysterious owner who owned him prior to our records and at some point Roland or Roland either sold or bequeathed Jack to has a kaya Sanford no yes, sorry has a kaya Sanford and We often think about these people as just being slaves that's how we identify them that this was a slave but in this case Jack was a veteran and Unlike many of the slaves in this database Jack actually fought for the side of the Americans in the Revolutionary War According to the work of Donald Lyons Jacobus in his book history and genealogy of the families of old Fairfield Jack enlisted on January 20th 1777 in Captain Ezekiel Sanford's company Unlike many slaves at this time Jack was fighting for the American cause many of the slaves that we have Documented fought for the British because there was this thing called a general birches certificate Which would free slaves who fought for the British army? However, Ezekiel Sanford Who Jack was serving under was the brother of has a kaya Sanford Jack's owner Ezekiel Clearly wanted to distance himself from Jack In fact Ezekiel made Jack serve with the surname Roland a name which he hadn't used in years Incredibly Jack wintered at Valley Forge meaning that he crossed paths with General George Washington But the string of by the spring of 1778 Jack was ill and homesick He asked to be sent back to Fairfield But under the conditions that he would work as a slave to Hezekiel Sanford for another three years This was an enormous sacrifice on Jack's part as Connecticut law dictated that his service to the militia itself would emancipate him Sanford agreed to the terms and reclaimed Jack as his slave and additionally paid for someone to take his place in the military After being given his freedom at the age of 28 Jack took the name Freeman He stayed in Fairfield, but what he did to stay afloat is still unknown And the final story that we wanted to share today was an example of a slave that we found when we just weren't looking for them Last semester. I was writing a paper about the history of Fairfield and I was using a source entitled The slaves of central Connecticut and I was just using it as a background research for a paper that I was writing when I came across Some information about a woman named time who was born in 1773 in Newtown But in 1804 1804 was sold to former slave Titus Bradley for fifty dollars Titus was a former slave here in Fairfield and he was formally emancipated by his owner Hezekiah Bradley in 1802 freed slaves purchasing Loved ones was a very common practice. So this was just what we thought another example when I looked into the database I didn't see them We were able to add them in there But according to the historian Daniel Crusen who wrote the book their story is a little bit different than some of the other ones We were expecting this purchase Stated that time was sold quote for enduring her natural life of the said Negro girl And giving the wording of this document as we supposed across the other documents that we were looking at This suggested that she was still a slave in the traditional sense when Titus Bradley purchased her However, time and Titus were married. So I just lost my place. So this is a supposition but what we're what we were able to deduce from this one little entry was that Todd Titus purchased his wife and she was remains enslaved because he couldn't emancipate her as a result of They're being married and he be him being a freed slave, which is a very interesting circumstance in our database And the reason why again we wanted to share this story was I was doing research on something completely different And we found a new slave for our database which Kind of goes to say that this work can never truly be done because we don't know what types of data is still out there that We haven't yet discovered And we're going to move on to what's next and Simply put what next is what's next is anything? This project can still be expanded upon there are certainly probate records We didn't get to look through yet. And like I said other types of sources. We just simply haven't crossed paths with yet Similar projects like this one can be completed by other historians in other towns Fairfields own database can continue to be expanded upon and there are so many other ways that we didn't look at our data What jobs did these slaves have in these households? Where did they live within the town lines? There are so many questions even within our database that Alec and I just simply haven't had the chance to answer yet Which we think is really cool because the project is able to continue and grow beyond the two of us And we're very excited to have Brendan McCarthy who is a rising senior here at Fairfield and a fellow American Studies major Continuing on the project next year and continuing in Dr. Rosovic's legacy As for what you all can do with our database it will permanently live here at the University at digitalhumanities.fairfield.edu slash slavery Which is very exciting and students faculty staff Anybody who is on our library website is able to use our database to continue in their own research or interest in the project Which I think is really exciting In addition to that we will be gifting a copy to Dr. Rose at the Fairfield Museum History Center so that people within the town can also look through the Genealogical work that we have and maybe find information about their own family or somebody who lived in the house that they lived in Which is also very very awesome, and we're very looking forward to it just Some final notes from Alec and I it has been a really really great honor to be able to work along this project We both remember why we started this project. We were so interested in learning a bit more about Fairfield And when Dr. Ruffine, Dr. Rosovic passed away Last last April it was without a doubt. We were going to continue this project in his memory And so we're very excited that you all came out with us today to See our database and to support us in all of that and we just wanted to give a couple of very important Thank yous first to the ladies at the probate court who were always so Excited to see us in here Yes, thank you And let us in their back room while we just were shuttered in there with a bunch of books looking at things that people had And looked at in years. Thank you very much and yes The second is to Dr. Rose in the Fairfield Museum and History Center a lot of what we have Contextually that we lost dr. Rosovic came from all of you and we're very appreciative of all of that help. I Mentioned him already, but Robert Hoyt who works here in the library Alec and I have no idea How any computer things work and without Robert Hoyt? This wouldn't have been this would have been possible I'm so thank you for always helping us with this and answering my very late-night emails with a meeting the very next morning Very very appreciative of that Finally to our mentor dr. Ruffini who took on the project and us after dr. Rosovic's passing last year We have very much appreciate your guidance your support And your help throughout the last year and we're very very appreciative of all that you have done for us And thank you so much And finally to Alexa Milady who helped us organize this event today and helped us order all this wonderful food And print these wonderful brochures. Thank you so much for all of your help So, thank you very much and dr. Ruffini is gonna say something final I've already made up a fictional story about how this project can be housed in the provost's office Now we have somebody from the provost's office here to set us straight Actually with with some brief words dr. Barisch good if you would thank you Good afternoon everyone. I'm struck by the fact that this to me is what a fairfield education looks like it is Extraordinary what these two young people Alec and Olivia have done Under the guidance of professor Ruffini. Could we just give them one more shout out? It is Their work will be featured tomorrow at the innovation Research innovative research symposium and also at the reception afterward So please do come by and visit them yet again and learn more about their projects The more that we get to engage with them the more we get to learn the more Exciting it is I'm really honored to be here today to celebrate the research of both Olivia and Alec With the support of their faculty mentor professor Giovanni Ruffini, which began and Continued the work of that of my friend and colleague the late professor Vin Rosevac For those of you in the room who knew Vin you may likely recall how he would often recommend that faculty investigate iPeds data That captures key points of information about gender and racial diversity Hiring at universities and colleges across the US budgetary numbers and a whole range of other sources of data He wanted his fellow faculty members to gather evidence through data to build their arguments Around compensation and salary in particular. I recall sitting in those general faculty meetings and these are the meetings for students where all of the faculty at Fairfield come together and vote on particular issues and policies etc and I remember when I first started at Fairfield almost 20 years ago now and I sat there listening to Vin talk about iPeds data and I honestly did not know what in the world He was talking about and I thought then when I learned that he was a professor of the class classics I thought wow, this is this is interesting I would have expected this from a professor of mathematics or maybe economics, but it was coming from Vin and what he was doing was Inviting us into the ways that we can gather Evidence make arguments and assert our claims based upon them. He was making a bigger case in short He was inviting faculty to learn the facts on their own About the university where they worked and taught our students He was inviting us to understand that knowing your immediate context is critical to understanding and shaping your reality This research project to create a register of slaves in Fairfield, Connecticut Manifest the impulse of Vin's life and work Olivia and Alec have gone deep into archival records to gather information about native and African American slaves Here in this town where we live and where we work This work will enable descendants from slaves to learn about their ancestors in ways that will enable them to understand their life stories such work contributes to that of others such as Sharon Morgan and from other people around the country who have developed archival data and Done so so that descendants of slaves in the United States can investigate their genealogies This effort today that we've learned about Connects to others that started under the works project administration or the WPA in the 1930s When journalists and writers were paid by the government to travel throughout the south and gather the stories of the last generation of living slaves this archive now at the Library of Congress called remembering slavery and popularized by the HBO documentary Offers a groundwork for the Fairfield project, which belongs to a rich and essential one in the United States How many of you know about the remembering slavery project? Few of you. How many of you have used it in your classes? Yeah, I know that Betsy Bohn uses it also and she's not here today It is an extraordinary resource if you are not familiar with it Identifying archiving and remembering slaves brings their stories to light and in acts the process of Decolonization through humanizing those who have been dehumanized Having access to those pieces of information about these lived human experiences Enables native and African-American peoples to know about their life stories It also holds accountable those who have owned slaves and engaged in the process of colonization We also need to hold that part of the story Which played out here in fairfield connecticut and was central to building the town in which we live and or work A critical part of this project is its digital presence that will make it widely accessible The digital humanities project of the humanities institute in the college of arts and sciences has made this possible Yesterday along with many of you. I'm sure I had the opportunity to see the presentations by the humanities institute student fellows And I was particularly struck by two of those presentations that I thought echoed the work of both olivia and alec One project examined the murals in connecticut post offices that were painted as part of the works project administration in the 1930s And the other was about folklore in the gambia These may seem a bit disparate So hear me out Alec and olivia engaged in deep archival research to unearth a critical part of fairfield's local history Gathering information about slaves many of whom were forced to come to the united states from the african continent where the gambia is Ultimately their project will enable descendants of these peoples to know their story A critical element of making sense of our realities that expand well beyond the boundaries of fairfield connecticut to the world Such research projects carried out by fairfield students under faculty mentorship are the hallmark of a fairfield education We support our students in taking their interests and pursuing them beyond the classroom or the laboratory Whether it's deep into the bowels of a museum's basement or across the atlantic to the gambia Professor rozevac understood the centrality of this process that makes a fairfield liberal arts education so unique This afternoon we celebrate his memory as it lives on through this project Which will contribute to our collective understanding of the world in which we live and it will empower us to make it a better place We do in the provost office have support to continue this work And we are committed to supporting the student who has already been identified And we will continue to support this work and we look forward to doing so In the meantime, please join me in congratulating olivia and alec whose exploration of the past will help carry us into a better future. Thank you Thank you Now I know we have three laptops set up with the database for all of you to explore yourself in real time now But before we do that if there are any questions for olivia and alec I know that this wouldn't be complete if we didn't put them on the spot and make them squirm a little bit about the work They've done so please if any of you do have any questions. I know I I have several myself. So if If any of you would like to ask So I was wondering if there was going to be the opportunity for Others besides those who can access fairfields library site to interface with this information Okay. Um, yeah, so that is something that we're definitely going to be considering as we move forward from today I think that the two most important places for us to deliver the site to Before today was to the university and to the historical society. Um, and so then moving forward Um, I think that one of uh, both of our goals is to figure out other places that we can house it Um, I was going through emails just last night. Um, like from the last two and a half years attached to this project To see anything else I could pull out. Um, and I found uh old link that dr Rocivic had sent us about um a project that's local to kinetic it that puts down stones or like memorials of where Slavery used to occur in kinetic it. So that's something that I mean, I'm going to look into in the future. Um But there has to be more places like that that we can also explore including places to put the database itself I think I have to share something to answer that. Thank you. Dr. Rose Have referenced online as well So yes and no For about a year. I have been using online copies and searching via a search bar through that Um, but then in the last couple of months for some reason it has become nearly unavailable. And so Only there are two of the volumes of this book on ancestry.com It's not as easily accessible as the original copy that I was using But it is still pretty easy to look through it And if you actually type in the page number To the keyword section, which is cited on all of these entries of households You can just go straight to the household and read As much as you feel You know in clientele But yeah, it it's Kind of difficult to navigate now I was just going to make that suggestion For anyone following your work that they should hyperlink those page numbers because many people are not Don't have access to libraries where they can exactly These three copies do live here at the Fairfield University Library. However, if anybody on campus wants to see them First of all, thank you so much for doing this work and presenting it to us um I was reading just this morning about Georgetown students Who are really engaged in activism around reparations? Based on what they've learned about the local circumstances, right? I'm not going to put you on the spot necessarily not my place. Although I'm interested to hear But I do want to know Um Based on being so deep and engaged in this local work What has really changed for you personally about how you think about This critical part of our history that's issue Um, I mean really everything but On a smaller scale Now when I am walking around my own town of Huntington, New York and in Fairfield, Connecticut, I'm always looking at this place in terms of history I'm thinking when I walk down post road that I'm Not just I'm not the only one to have done this that some of the people in our database probably did this as well and As I'm thinking about my own life walking down that road. They were thinking about their own lives And it's really just humanized all of these records for me You know, they're not they're not just names and numbers and values. They're real people with real stories Yeah, and I think to echo some of that um something that I've definitely noticed over like the last two and a half years of working on this is household like the household names that bear Like kind of like what Georgetown is doing have the household names in the town of fairfield that bear Marks of slavery in them It's something like in our original like when there were three of us on the project one of our big things um With the other student researcher was seeing how many street names in fairfield are named after household in our database Which we also have information of and so when we're driving through town and we like Recognize a street name or recognize a street name Jennings beach Jennings beach penfield pavilion Barlow road just some of the names that you can see in our database are just all over and it's very cognizant even When uh, we still had the Sturgis barn on on campus before it got tore down We definitely did our research into who that Sturgis was Um, it wasn't one of us. Don't worry. You would have heard about it by now Uh, no relation to any of our people to our knowledge, but it's something that I've definitely been more cognizant of Yes This book So it's actually pretty interesting Negro is only one of the terms that is used to describe some of these slaves There are also slaves that are described as mulatto, which is As far as I know only partially negro just using the Vocabulary of this particular topic and then there are a few quote indian slaves Um for the large majority it is negro and mulatto And Yeah, it's sometimes. Yes, sometimes just servant my slave Oftentimes they didn't really just They didn't care enough about the person to actually describe them in any way so One of the interesting things about that though on the flip side of that is when they were interested in describing them It was in runaway slave ads something that alex didn't really touch upon very Generally, but we're happy to explain during the reception or if you're just genuinely curious Is when we had runaway slave ads They would describe that individual to the t like liked to play the flute at one particular instance like very very specific And so those are very interesting uh juxtapositions in the data. Um, that I think is also important to recognize Dr. Rocky, uh, I just this brings up a really interesting point from the connection The runaway slave ad was a was a project of some Wesleyan students and like a half dozen years ago I can't I couldn't most recently find the website that they supposedly Put up for perpetuity but If you have a list of those most importantly, you actually have Jpegs of those if you made photos of them That might be very interesting chance where Mm-hmm Yes, I I know that Cornell University has a site called freedom on the move which has cataloged something like 1200 different runaway slave ads from all across the country Um, it's free to use. You just need to create a username and password Which I'll probably forget eventually Um, but it's really fascinating Well, yeah, and you might be able to contribute Informations those as well as just having it for yourself. You know, yes, absolutely We can take one more question and then we can start the reception. Yeah Yeah, could you explain to us the the cost placed on the slaves? Was that what the Owner paid for the slave or this person simply valued at this? Yeah So on one of my earlier slides, you might have seen the value average. Um, that was from probate records With just like dina on that slide where I was explaining the methodology. Um, it said she was 30 pounds Those are values as if any, uh, like the chairs in the house had similar like similar values appraised to them The land had similar values appraised to them. Um, so those are the values Supposed of that person or of that item if it was like their bedding or whatever Supposed by the executors of the Inventory will and distribution So those weren't actually payments unless we had indication that they were like deeds of sale But for a majority of them the values are the values assigned in the probate records And values change depending on the age of the slave the gender of the slave and their ability So we have one record of a slave who is blind and she's not going to be as valuable to a slave owner as a young man would be Awesome. Um, we're happy to continue to take questions, but we wanted you all to enjoy the reception That was sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences as well Um, thank you again so much for coming and we really appreciate it