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North Carolina project to preserve slave deeds.
ASHEVILLE - A grant to digitize slave deed records across the state is opening doors to preserve and learn from the documents of North Carolina’s past.
Just shy of $300,000 was awarded by the National Historic Publications and Records Commission to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro to fund the expansion of a project to digitize nearly 10,000 slave deeds and bills of sale from 26 counties across the state. Once digitized, the records will go into a searchable database accessible to the public.
“It’s a massive project,” said Buncombe County Register of Deeds Drew Reisinger. “It’s not a simple task to go back through records in every courthouse in the South, find all of the slave deed records, digitize them and make them available.”
And Reisinger would know — the statewide project is modeled in part after the Buncombe County slave deeds project that he began in 2012, after realizing that slave deeds and bills of sale were considered property records, and therefore, were housed in his office. The records were made digital and uploaded to a countywide database, allowing community mem- bers, historians and descendants of slave owners to search the materials for references to their past.
But having an online record of one county’s slave deeds just isn’t enough, Reisinger said.
“Slaves were traded across county lines and across state lines, so just having one county didn’t do much for people looking for their ancestors,” he said.
To Sasha Mitchell, chair of the Buncombe County African American Heritage Commission, the grant is tremendous.
“There is a paper trail and this is it — this is the path of my ancestors, through slave deeds and bills of sale,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell recently traveled to UNC Chapel Hill to access several papers tied to her enslaved ancestors. The papers were pulled from a collection and were not allowed to leave a specific room in the library. Ultimately, she took photographs of the documents before driving four hours back to Asheville.
“Speaking as someone who looks frantically for this kind of thing but is often hindered by physical distance or accessibility of the document, now there may be an easier way to have access,” Mitchell said. “It may not be evident yet, but when the first counties go online and people can search for their missing ancestors, it will be amazing.”