Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative - Bills of Sale and Deeds, 1703-1865

Copy and paste abstractVirginia Untold: The African American Narrative is a project that provides digital access to historical records that document some of the lived experiences of enslaved and free Black and multiracial people in the Library of Virginia’s collections. This dataset, regarding Bills of Sale and Deeds, include documents that convey title of property, including enslaved people, from one party to another. Bills of sale typically involved a financial transaction, whereas deeds did not. The dataset represented here is the combination of two separate presentations of the indexed data: a spreadsheet index of individuals listed in each bill of sale or deed and a corresponding metadata record for each document. Records regarding specific individuals were created using data available on the Virginia Open Data Portal (https://data.virginia.gov/). These individual records are “matched” with item, or document, records available via the Library’s catalog discovery layer, and a link to the appropriate document accompanies each individual’s entry. The discovery layer also provides user access to the digitized version of the document, along with any available full-text indexes or transcriptions.