How do you tell a story that has been hidden? Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative (www.virginiamemory.com/collections/aan) sets out to answer that question by highlighting the voices of Virginia’s free and enslaved African American residents buried within administrative, estate, property, and court records. Since 2013, the Virginia Untold project has addressed the historic lack of documentation of African American lives by making available online over 10,000 individual documents. Within these items are the names and snippets of stories of more than 100,000 people of color living in Virginia. The records have also been used in our Transcribe project, resulting in indexing and transcription data that opens our collections for the next generation of research. The project grew in 2019 when the Library joined forces with the Virginia Museum of History and Culture to incorporate “Unknown No Longer,” its database of names of free people of color and enslaved Virginians in the period before 1865.
Virginia Untold is made possible by funding from Dominion Resources and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.