Saving Slave Houses is pleased to announce its collaboration with Bearing Witness to Enslaved Women and Their Future Issue and Increase in the Massie Family’s 18th– and 19th-Century Reproductive Labor Systems (Bearing Witness). Bearing Witness is the recipient of a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) award through its Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices program.
Bearing Witness is one of sixteen projects that received funding through the Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices program, which seeks to “deepen public understanding of the histories of communities whose work, experiences, and perspectives have been insufficiently recognized or attended.” Since its launch in 2021, the program has awarded nearly $12 million for 49 projects.
Bearing Witness received $300,000 and is a three-year project beginning in January 2026 and ending in December 2028. The project is a collaboration between Duke Libraries’ David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library; the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin; the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library; the Special Collections Research Center at the College of William & Mary; Virginia Museum of History & Culture; and Saving Slave Houses.
At the conclusion of the Bearing Witness project public-domain Massie family collections will be digitized and unified through open access platforms with standardized metadata and the Enslaved Persons Database. A public-facing website will provide context and access to the multiple institutional repositories containing the Massie family collections. The website will include institutional repository information and browsing options and finding aid links alongside the dataset. It will also include the Guide to the Massie Family Archive, which will serve as the online finding aid to the holistic Massie collection.
More than 1,300 births of enslaved children were documented in the Massie slave inventories. Bearing Witness exposes the hidden lives of these enslaved children and mothers exploited for reproductive labor by the Massie family through the creation of the Enslaved Persons Database. The database will be shared with the public as a downloadable dataset of information about the enslaved people documented in the digitized records. Each entry in the dataset will contain citation information that includes collection information and a URI linking to the digitized document. The dataset will allow users to search for enslaved people across all collections simultaneously.
Bearing Witness Details
Grant Sponsor
This project is supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation.
Award Details
- Award Amount: $300,000
- Project Timeline: 3 years (2026-2028)
Project Title
Bearing Witness to Enslaved Women and Their Future Issue and Increase in the Massie Family’s 18th- and 19th-Century Reproductive Labor Systems (Bearing Witness)
Project Team
- Jobie Hill, Project PI, History Department, Duke University
- David M. Rubenstein Rare Book Manuscript Library, Duke University
- Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin
- Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, The University of Virginia
- Special Collections Research Center, The College of William and Mary
- Virginia Museum of History & Culture
- Star Reams, Saving Slave Houses
Bearing Witness Deliverables
- Digitized Massie family collections available on open access platforms with standardized metadata
- A downloadable dataset of the enslaved people documented in the digitized records
- A public-facing website that provides context and access to the multiple institutional repositories containing the Massie family collections
- Guide to the Massie Family Archive, an online finding aid to the holistic Massie collection
- Transcriptions of select Massie collections