The Challenges and Significance of Digitally Preserving the Oldest Records for Africans in the Americas

This paper will discuss the ongoing efforts of teams at Vanderbilt University to identify, locate and digitally preserve the oldest records for Africans and their descendants in the Americas, a number of which date to the sixteenth century and are in perilous condition. The Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies was launched in 2002 and with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the British Library Endangered Archives Programme has now captured approximately 400,000 document images from Cuba, Brazil, Colombia and what is today the United States, many of which capture an average of five persons per image. Ecclesiastical sources are the longest, and most uniform, serial data available for the history of Africans in the Americas. They include religious records such as confirmations, petitions to wed, wills, burials and last testaments, religious brotherhood records and even, on occasion, divorce actions. Notarial records in the ESSSS archive include bills of sale, property inventories and other documents that record slave lives. Although the target is Africans, other non-European groups, such as Chinese and a variety of indigenous peoples are also represented in this archive. Scholars are now using these records to construct databases to support their research, but our primary goal is to preserve the historical legacy that is being lost daily due to climate, a lack of local resources and archival training and, in some cases, ongoing regional violence. The dispersed nature of the records makes them difficult for scholars to access. Most have never been seen by scholars, and if not captured quickly, they will never be. In an effort to slow the loss, ESSSS project teams train and equip local archivists and students to take up this preservation effort.