Earlier this month, Harvard published a database identifying more than 1,600 people who were enslaved by University leaders, faculty or staff, or who labored on campus as enslaved individuals between 1636 and 1865. The project, part of Harvard’s effort to publicly acknowledge its ties to slavery, takes a fresh look at old records and sheds new light on what we know about generations before.
Lindsay Fulton is chief research officer at American Ancestors, a nonprofit genealogical organization assisting Harvard and simultaneously working to recover the names of the estimated 10 million men women and children of African descent enslaved between the 1500s and 1865. She joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to break down how researchers built the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program database and what the public can learn from it. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: This database represents a massive expansion of what we knew back in 2022, when Harvard only had about 70 names of enslaved people. What was a point when you all realized the list of names was much bigger?
Lindsay Fulton: I would say it was around when we first started talking to Harvard about helping with the project. Part of the work that we do at American Ancestors is a project called 10 Million Names, an effort to identify — by name — the 10 million men, women and children who were enslaved in what is now the United States before 1865. That particular project made me very aware of how many people were living in New England at the period of time that slavery was legal. And I knew it was more than 70. That was the first place that we started.
Rath: And tell us a bit more about how American Ancestors does this type of work. The task is kind of staggering, going back as far as 400 years.
Fulton: It’s quite a task, for sure. Really, there’s two phases of the project. One is the effort by Harvard to identify the people who were enslaved by leadership faculty and staff. So, we needed a list of the leadership faculty and staff members and that was something that did not exist prior to the project starting. So, that was the first task that we went about was putting together that particular list.
Second part of this is, did they enslave anyone? In those cases, we look for records that can help us to identify usually property. So, we’re looking for estate information — whether that’s probate, land records, tax lists. If there are estate files that [an] individual may have held on their own, personal papers that were donated to an organization — we want to take a look at those.
We also found that church records tended to identify enslaved individuals, as well, and the caveat at the end of that particular record will be “servant to Mr. Hancock,” in which case we know Mr. Hancock was the person who was enslaving those individuals. So, that’s how we have started to put together this list, and that’s how it has ballooned from 70 to over 1,600. And we’re not done with putting that list together.
Rath: Wow. And I’m curious how Harvard compares to other research you’ve done for the 10 Million Names Project. How does the research compare to other places?
Fulton: I would say research in New England versus research in, say, the Mid-Atlantic or the South is very different. New England tended to organize their records by town, we’re very town-centric. And with that particular organizational structure, we find things on the much more local level than we would outside of the South, for example. The South tends to organize things by county. So, that makes things a little bit easier for us when we’re working in New England.
The other thing is: Records are generally just better in New England. They wrote stuff down more, they kept stuff more. So we’ve been able to trace individuals in New England better than we’ve been able to in the South. That doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to do in the South or the Mid-Atlantic, it’s just different record sets that you would be looking for.
When you’re doing enslaved research — because you’re looking for estate records, because people were considered property — you’re always looking for records that help you to understand that enslaver’s estate. If people have more estate and more personal estate, more real estate, they tend to leave along a larger paper trail and that makes our jobs as genealogists easier. So the leaders at Harvard tended to leave personal papers behind.
Rath: We’ve talked in detail about the particular challenges of genealogical research with enslaved people, but I’m curious also to hear about the impact side of this, right, because this is a type of genealogy where you have untold histories for a whole range of people who may not know their own histories, it’s quite profound.
Fulton: Because of the complex nature of enslavement, but also the enslaved communities, and the group of people who were enslaving them, what this particular project does is it gives us a really good insight into the enslaved population in New England at the time. Because we’re spending all this time looking at the descendants of the enslaved, we find that people are intermarrying between families of people associated with Harvard. It’s a small place at the time, so we find this really complex web of family trees that are overlapping between those descendants. And that gives not just genealogists a better understanding of what the world looked like at the time, but this is gonna help other academic fields as well. And I think we’re gonna learn a whole lot [more] about the complexity of families and enslavement in New England than we’ve ever known before.
In addition to that, it’s giving people access to their family histories. And once we start putting those trees together and including more families and more record sets, the easier it will be for African Americans to do their family history. And everyone should have access to their family history.
And this project, 10 Million Names, with the aid of Harvard and their Legacy of Slavery project, provides people with more information than they’ve had access to in the past.
