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Updated May 2023

Slavery Era Finding Aids Remediation

Legacy Description of Slavery Era Collections

Wilson Library holds more than 500 collections that document people claimed as property and reflect the violence and dehumanization of slavery in the U.S. South. These materials date from the early 1700s to the late 1800s following emancipation and include bills of sale of enslaved people; receipts that document the hiring out of labor of enslaved people; lists of enslaved people maintained by their enslavers; plantation journals and account books that document the labor, skills, and knowledge of enslaved people and their participation in the local economies; letters written about and sometimes by enslaved people; and legal documents, such as wills that document the trafficking of enslaved people across generations of families.

Beginning in 1930, UNC history professor J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, motivated by his vision to create a repository for the preservation and study of the history of the U.S. South, began a concerted effort to collect materials chiefly from politically and socially influential white families in this region. Hamilton’s Southern Historical Collection, which today is part of the Wilson Special Collections Library, was intended to perpetuate a white supremist narrative of history.

Librarians and archivists who wrote the initial descriptions of these collections, which were often an inventory of itemized documents, focused entirely on the lived experiences of white people and did not consider the lives of enslaved people. In the 1980s and 1990s, new finding aids were written that identified the institution of slavery as a subject for scholarly research, but still failed to center individuals who were not white. Euphemistic and non-inclusive language, a style that privileged academic researchers over all others seeking access to materials about enslaved people, is used throughout these finding aids.

Our past practices are problematic, and we are working to repair them by rectifying language that upholds white supremacy and by highlighting materials created by and about enslaved people. Older versions of revised finding aids will be available to researchers.

For more information about plans and milestones for this work, please see information about our remediation projects and our guidelines for finding aid remediation below. We welcome thoughts, suggestions, and questions at [email protected].

Additional Resources from UNC Libraries:

Remediation projects

Finding aids remediation: 2024

The following remediation projects were prompted by Wilson Library researchers:

The following remediation project was completed in the course of processing a new accession:

  • 340. Laurens Hinton Papers: Updated abstract, subject headings, biographical note, scope and content note, and contents list). Earlier versions of the finding aid are available upon request.

Finding aids remediation: 2023

The following remediation projects were prompted by and/or done in consultation with Wilson Library researchers:

  • 133. Cameron Family Papers: remediation of abstract, biographical note, collection scope and content note, and all series level descriptions; compression of sub-subseries in series 1 and 2; review of series 1 (partial), 2, 3.1 (partial), 5, and 6 (partial), for material about enslaved, free, and freed people; addition of description for records of enslavement and records of Reconstruction at folder level.
  • 322. Hawkins Family Papers: remediation of abstract, biographical note, collection scope and content note, and all series level descriptions; compression of sub-subseries into subseries; review of series 1 (1845-1865), for material about enslaved, free, and freed people; addition of description for records of enslavement at folder level.
  • 3223. Battle Family Papers: remediation of abstract, biographical note, collection scope and content note, and all series level descriptions; compression of sub-subseries into subseries; review of legacy finding aid for material about enslaved, free, and freed people; addition of description for records of enslavement and records of Reconstruction at folder level.
  • 389. Robert A. Jones Papers: revised to more accurately reflect collection content about enslaved, free, and Indigenous people.
  • 2055. Collection of Manumission Records in North Carolina: revised to more accurately reflect collection content about enslaved and free people.
  • 1912. Blackford Family Papers: updated abstract, subject headings, biographical note, scope content note, and container list.

The following remediation projects were completed in the course of processing new accessions:

Finding aids remediation: July through December 2022

Six month phase of ongoing project

  • Completed the remediation of the finding aids listed on the Popular Topics by Collection page on the Studying Slavery in the Southern Historical Collection Lib Guide. Documented the practice and guidelines used for this remediation.

  • Began remediating corresponding catalog records for remediated finding aids.

  • Identified, redescribed, and queued for digitization images of enslaved and/or formerly enslaved people in slavery-era collections. Example: William Starr Meyers Images

  • Drafted statement about historical finding aid practice and our remediation. Statement vetted by Ethical Description Working Group and Southern Historical Collection staff.

  • Drafted text of a banner to be included on finding aids for slavery era collections notifying researchers of content and the bias in finding aid description. The text will be included in a finding aid note now and incorporated as a banner when we implement a new finding aids public interface system.

  • Piloted linking to legacy finding aids that have been scanned and turned into pdfs. Example: Hubard Family Papers

Adding names of enslaved people to finding aids, November 2021-February 2022

  • Added names of enslaved people to the description of Benjamin Franklin Little Papers:

    • Biographical note
    • Scope and Content
    • Series 1A, 2 series descriptions
    • Folder 30

  • Added names of enslaved people to the description of Arnold and Screven Family Papers:

    • Biographical note
    • XOPF-3419/1

  • Added names of enslaved and free people of color to the description for Bullock and Hamilton Family Papers:

    • Biographical note

    • Folders 5, 6, 19, 22, 25, 29, 30, 39

      The biographical note and folder 19 include this note to acknowledge archivist intervention: NOTE: parenthetical information is derived from original document; the archivist has used more modern terms to describe the physical condition of Jordan, the age of Patience, and the occupations of Dick, Charity, Charlotte, Eily, and William.

  • Added names of enslaved people to the description for these volumes in Hentz Family Papers:

    • Autobiography Parts I and II

    • Obstetrical Record

      Includes this explanatory note: patients who were enslaved typically are listed by first name only, followed by the name of the enslaver in the case list. In the index, the patients who were enslaved are typically listed with the last name of the enslaver. Processing archivists have employed the index version of the name to potentially enhance discovery. When we have misidentified a person's last name, please let us know at [email protected].

    • Medical Journal

  • Added names of enslaved people to the description of volumes and correspondence in Clegg Family Papers:

    • Rock Springs Steam Saw Mill, circa 1866-1868
    • Mill account book, circa 1866-1868
    • Soapstone Mills merchandise account book, 1870
    • Rock Spring Steam Saw Mill, circa 1866-1867
    • Farm time book, circa 1865-1868
    • Rocky River Mill time book, 1865, 1875-1876
    • Time book, circa 1872-1873
    • Farm time book, circa 24 August 1873-1874
    • Correspondence, 1865

Antebellum finding aids: LibGuides project, summer and fall 2020

  • Focusing on finding aids highlighted in UNC Libraries LibGuides Using Records about Slavery in the Southern Historical Collection and Voices of the Enslaved in Wilson Special Collections Library.

  • Revised language in 30 small finding aids. Examples: Isabella C Sourtan Letter and Ben Sparkman Plantation Journal

  • Exploring approaches to remediation work on large and medium-sized collections of planation records and records about enslavement.

Antebellum finding aids: Pilot project, spring 2020

  • Revised 10 finding aids to experiment with how to conceptualize antebellum finding aid work

  • Rewrote abstracts centering enslaved communities

  • Included universal headings: Slavery--United States--History--19th century--Sources; Slavery--United States--History--18th century--Sources.

  • Revised headings for plantations, geographic names

  • Examples include: Prudhomme Family, Quitman Family, and Pettigrew Family

Creating name authority records for names for enslaving families, spring and summer 2020

  • Headings created for approximately three hundred families

Revision of what was called the Tunstall Family Letter, fall 2019

  • In response to a remediation request from Research and Instructional Services, we reframed the finding aid to decenter the white male enslaver.

  • We renamed the collection the Mary Tunstall Letter on Enslaved Child Betsy

Revising Maunsel White finding aid, summer 2019

  • In response to a remediation request from the SHC, we rewrote narrative description in the Maunsel White Papers that asserted in classic Lost Cause fashion that White was a "benevolent slave holder."

  • We also rewrote the abstract to center description on material related to enslaved people.

Revising J. Marion Sims finding aid, summer 2019

  • In response to a remediation request from Research and Instructional Services, we rewrote the abstract, scope/content note, and the biographical note in the J. Marion Sims Papers that asserted that Sims who had conducted medical experiments on enslaved women was a “pioneer” in the field of gynecology.

  • We also analyzed the collection’s contents to see if there was any content about his experimentation on enslaved women. We did not find any, and we made that absence of information clear. “Sims also discussed the sale of enslaved persons, but the papers do not include any documentation of the experimental gynecological and cancer surgeries he conducted on enslaved women.”

Remediation Guidelines

Remediation goal: repair description to make it more accessible, equitable, and helpful.

Shared definitions:

  • Accessible: the description does not assume insider knowledge, contexts are explained
  • Equitable: we will center what we know of the enslaved people as best we can and remove venerative language about white people.
  • Helpful: sources about enslaved people are featured prominently

EAD tag revisions

  • Update <revision>: Updated for Conscious Editing of [all that apply: collection overview, subject headings, biographical note, scope and content, and contents list] by [Your Name].

  • Update <processinfo>

    • Conscious Editing Work by: [Name], [month year]. Updated [collection overview, subject headings, biographical note, scope and content, and container list].
    • Add racial identity statement if it is not already there.

Collection overview: This is a balancing act of centering what we know about Black people without misrepresenting the extent of the documentation available. In this phase of remediation we are decentering whiteness by removing venerative language, but not eliminating existing description about the white family that is still useful.

  • Move biographical info from 545 tags to the 520; delete 545 tags.

  • Reduce/remove as much biographical information as possible. In family papers, individual names should be few if any (they can still appear in the subject headings). Remove venerative language (e.g., prosperous, prominent, planter) and edit as needed. If "prominence" should be conveyed, try "politically and socially influential," or other language that speaks more directly to the power than "prominence."

  • Add racial identity to the white family.

  • Acknowledge existence of enslaved people and their relationship to the white family that they are living alongside of in the first sentence.

    • Jackson and Prince Family: The papers of Jackson, Prince, and Cobb families of Athens, Macon, and other locations in Georgia, and the Rootes family of Fredericksburg, Va., document the lives of white plantation-owning families and the people enslaved by them on Halscot Plantation outside Athens, Ga.; Cookshay Plantation in Chambers County, Ala.; and other plantations in Bibb and Baker counties, Ga.

  • Acknowledge plantation was based on enslaved labor.

    • David Outlaw: David Outlaw, a white farmer and a Whig member of Congress from 1847 to 1853, owned a farm near Windsor in Bertie County, N.C., whose operations included the forced labor of enslaved people. George, an enslaved person, managed the farm in David Outlaw's absence.

  • Acknowledge when Black people are the creators of the documentation and when they are represented from white people’s perspective (which is most often the case)

    • Elliott and Gonzalez Family: Enslaved people are represented in bills of sale and lists of enslaved people. There are also a few letters written by enslaved people and several more about them, especially their labor and acts of resistance to slavery, from the perspective of white family members.

  • Recenter any available information about Black people to the first couple of sentences after the initial statement about who is documented in the collection.

    • William Alexander Hoke: Topics include the buying and selling of enslaved people; human trafficking, then called "hiring out"; abolitionism; reminiscences about Julia, a nurse formerly enslaved by the family; Reconstruction era terrorism, including references to activities of the Ku Klux Klan; and Black membership at St. Luke's Church in Lincolnton, N.C. Other topics include...

  • Add plantation names that appear in container list, even if minor.

  • Add formats (deeds, indentures, wills, lists of enslaved people, estate papers, ledgers, whatever records document lives of enslaved people).

    • Mary Hunter Kennedy: Enslaved people are represented in bills of sale and work contracts that evidence human trafficking, and in the contested will of Christopher Houston (1737-1844), the anti-slavery patriarch who upon his death manumitted the people he enslaved.

Subject headings: See Slavery era headings for the universal heading that we are assigning to all slavery era collections, other suggested headings relating to formats and related topics, and instructions for plantation heading construction.

Biographical note: For now, just do some basic editing

  • Add racial identity.
  • Remove venerative language (e.g., planter, prominent, prosperous) and edit as needed.
  • Add slave schedule information, if available.
  • Add information about individual enslaved/Black people who are documented in the collection: Name, dates, locations, enslavers

    • George Hairston Papers: Enslaved people documented in the collection include Elizabeth, a house servant, and her daughter by her enslaver Robert Hairston, probably in Lowndes County, Miss.; Frank, a child of 2 months who was sold from the estate of Absalom Powell in Columbus County, N.C., to Richard L. Byrne; Nancy, who attended to women enslaved by George Hairston and who herself was enslaved by Mary J. Cabaniss, probably in Pittsylvania County, Va.; and Roda, a girl enslaved by George Hairston (location unknown).

      Some genealogical research of people enslaved at Hairston family plantations has been done by descendent family members and is available at Hairston Family Genealogy.

Scope and Content: Sometimes you will copy and paste the collection overview; often there is enhanced description that may be remediated. As in the collection overview, this is a careful balancing act of centering what we know about Black people without misrepresenting the extent of the documentation available. We also want to decenter whiteness, but not eliminate existing description that is still useful. Below is an example of a non-traditional remediation of a collection level scope and content notes to highlight information about Black lives that was previously only at the file level.

  • Blackford Family Papers: this collection has a lot of description about Black people, but too much for an easily readable paragraph. See the collection level scope and content note for a list that preserves all of the keywords for searching while being slightly easier to read.

  • Springs Family Papers: this one has heavy description at the file level. Rather than replicate that heavy description at the collection scope and content note, there is a list of topics by series that provides key word access without replicating the heavier description applied to folder groupings (formerly subseries).

Contents list

  • Can the subseries be compressed to eliminate sub-sub-series?

  • Add meaningful titles to all <unittitle>at the <c02>, <c03>, <c04> levels. Many antebellum finding aids have just dates at the subseries and folder levels. Add a format or other descriptor to the date.

  • Remediate language (see Language Overview below)

  • Remove quotes that only add literary flourish or describe violence against Black people.

  • Remove repetition of biographical information about white people unless crucial to understanding the rest of the scopenote.

  • Add item/folder level information for materials about Black people (if possible)

  • Lists, wills, and bills of sale often will have names of enslaved people

  • Overseer-plantation owner correspondence sometimes has names of enslaved people; description of the work performed by enslaved people, which may give some indication of occupation; descriptions of acts of resistance; and sometimes includes a characterization of conditions in the "neighborhood" (community) of the enslaved people. When describing acts of resistance by enslaved people, be thoughtful of what is essential to put in the finding aid and what can introduce bias.

    • Hayes Collection: (see folder 582 scopenote): August 12: William S. Pettigrew described the circumstances in which Wilson, who worked in the house and was enslaved to Pettigrew at Magnolia, stole money from him and later confessed.

      Revise as

      August 12: William S. Pettigrew described the circumstances in which Wilson, who worked in the house and was enslaved to Pettigrew at Magnolia, allegedly stole money from him.

      Pettigrew's letter says that Wilson confessed, but we should be skeptical of this report and we are not obligated to report everything Pettigrew says in the finding aid. We really don’t know if Wilson stole the money, if a confession was coerced, or even if a confession happened. This is a white enslaver writing to another white enslaver. The hook for (most?) researchers is not the confession, but the act of resistance.

  • Make sure all content about Black people is represented at higher <c0n> levels (sub-series, series, and collection overview).

Language overview:

  • Remove dehumanizing and marginalizing language, Lost Cause mythology
  • Slave-->enslaved person
  • Planter-->plantation owner
  • Slaveholder-->enslaver
  • Civil War-->American Civil War
  • Free Blacks-->Free Black people
  • Slave bills of sale-->bills of sale for people who were enslaved
  • Plantation life-->note that it is plantation life for white people
  • Supervising slaves-->overseeing the forced labor of enslaved people
  • Enslaved labor-->expand to enslaved labor, skills, and knowledge
  • Characterizing enslaved people of a plantation as a community where possible
  • Trafficking-->can be used to describe hiring out and transfer of people claimed as property
  • List of slaves-->list of enslaved people
  • Hiring out, buying and selling-->trafficking through hiring out / buying / selling

Helpful antebellum finding aids are accessible to a broad, general audience:

  • Describe sources about enslaved people near the listing of volumes and folders; coordinate description to page-able units 
  • Facilitate searching by geographic markers, genre types, source types, and topics. 
  • Describe the types of information that are available for researching Black family history 
  • Facilitate jumping in and out of the finding aid with a google keyword search; would not make understanding of the materials dependent on reading the finding aid linearly. 
  • Highlight materials about enslaved people but does not distort the density and accessibility of this data and how it shows up in a large bulky collection.  
  • Support genealogical research by providing information about the families represented.
  • Note correspondents beyond the other family members.  
  • Historicize and contextualize racist content  
  • Characterize the content i.e. say if the diaries and letters are descriptive and not routine 
  • Explain specialized information e.g. defining the terms manumission and indenture; explaining "race problem"; and defining source types like daybook

Slavery Era Subject Headings

Headings to include for all slavery era collections

Assign as appropriate (given dates)

  • Slavery--United States--History--18th century--Sources.
  • Slavery--United States--History--19th century--Sources.

Additional relevant headings

  • Confederate States of America--Social conditions.
  • Domestic terrorism—United States—History—19th century. (for Reconstruction era violence)
  • Enslaved persons--(Geographic location)--Registers.
  • Plantations--(Geographic location).
  • Slave bills of sale--(Geographic location).
  • Slave records--(Geographic location).
  • Slave-trade--(Geographic location).
  • Slavery--(Geographic location).
  • Traffickers in enslaved persons--(Geographic location).
  • Trafficking in enslaved persons--(Geographic location).

Plantation heading construction

Guidelines for Constructing Plantation Name Headings Locally

  • The heading will contain the name and location of the plantation, with the broader geographical term (i.e., the state in which it is located) being sufficient, e.g.,
    • Buffaloe (Va.)
    • Quitzni (N.C.)
  • “Plantation” is not included in the name unless specifically indicated that it was part of the name. If needed, Plantation can be included as a qualifier at the end of the heading, e.g.,
    • Dulac (La. : Plantation)
  • In order to avoid conflicts with other named geographic entities, a more specific location can be used, or Plantation can be amended to the heading, or both of these strategies can be employed, e.g.,
    • Saratoga (Buckingham County, Va.)
    • Yeopim (Perquimans County, N.C. : Plantation)
  • Unnamed plantations will be given the name of the family that owns it, e.g.,
    • Comer Family Plantation (Ala.)
  • Plantations without clear locations?
    • If location can be narrowed down to two states, include both, e.g.,
      • Lake Washington Plantation (La. or Miss.)

Describing Plantations as Corporate Bodies in SNAC

SNAC's policy differs slightly and is included here for reference

This proposal serves to solidify a SNAC policy and practice for establishing and describing names of plantations, farms, ranches and the like, as corporate body entities. N.B.: This approach does not align with current practice at the Library of Congress, where the policy is to establish plantations as geographic place names in the LC subject file. An example from the Library of Congress Subject Headings would be Boone Hall Plantation (S.C.)

The justification for describing plantation names as corporate body entities:

  • Plantations were more than a geographic location
  • Plantations, as corporate entities, were more than just the houses/landmarks
  • Plantations were essentially family businesses, and establishing headings for them as corporate bodies recognizes that, and recognizes that in such a way as to allow relationships between it and other entities (i.e., those enslaved there, and those who enslaved people there) to be demonstrated

Guidelines for Constructing Plantation Name Headings in SNAC

  • The heading will contain the name and location of the plantation, with the broader geographical term (i.e., the state in which it is located) being sufficient, e.g.,
    • Buffaloe (Plantation : Va.)
    • Quitzni (Plantation : N.C.)
  • "Plantation" is not included in the name unless specifically indicated that it was part of the name. “Plantation” should be included as a qualifier at the end of the heading, e.g.,
    • Dulac (Plantation : La.)
  • In order to avoid conflicts with other named geographic entities, a more specific location can be used, e.g.,
    • Saratoga (Plantation : Buckingham County, Va.)
    • Yeopim (Plantation : Perquimans County, N.C.)
  • Unnamed plantations will be given the name of the family that owns it, e.g.,
    • Comer Family Plantation (Ala.)

Plantation Name Examples

  • Plantation House (Chowan County, N.C.)
  • Rosewell (Plantation : Va.)
  • Wyche Farm (Plantation : N.C.)
  • Magnolia Plantation (Natchitoches Parish, La.)
  • Magnolia (Plantation: Tyrrell County, N.C.)
  • Silk Hope Plantation (S.C.)