Valuing Enslaved Lives in Fauquier County, Virginia, 1798-1865

The Valuing Enslaved Lives in Fauquier County, Virginia, 1798-1865 (VEL) dataset is a longitudinal approach to the study of enslaved family genealogy, enslaved communities, the economics of the domestic slave trade, and the relationship between age and commodified value in a slave society. The VEL contains information extracted from 242 select documents—184 appraisals and inventories, 36 divisions of estates, and 22 records of sales—from two main collections of probate records: Fauquier County Will Books 3 through 30 and collections of probate documents compiled in the Circuit Superior Court’s Records at Large created between 1821 and 1882. The VEL dataset is not a complete record of all enslaved people identified in county probate records, but reflects data extracted from individual probate records that included at least one enslaved person identified by age and appraised value to serve as both a family history and research tool. The VEL dataset identifies 3,412 named and 219 unnamed enslaved individuals born between 1732 and 1865 whose appraised values were recorded in Fauquier County, Virginia probate records between 1798 and 1865. This includes entries for 2,200 enslaved individuals identified as female, 2,335 enslaved males, and 208 individuals of unknown gender recorded in 5,045 lines of data. The VEL also includes the names of 373 men who served as appraisers—people responsible for calculating the monetary value of each enslaved person—and 495 enslavers who profited from this commodified wealth in human property.