Duke Grad Student Awarded Grant to Digitize Historic Slavery Records

Post contributed by Hannah Jacobs, Digital Humanities Consultant

Duke Libraries is pleased to announce its partnership with History doctoral candidate Jobie Hill on her newly funded project, 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). Hill 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. Hill’s institutional partners include 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, the non-profit Hill founded to support research and public outreach.

1795 Land Survey by Major Thomas Massie, Massie family papers, 1766-1920s, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Hill’s research focuses on people enslaved by the Massie family during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bearing Witness will result in the digitization of the family’s papers housed at the partner institutions and a database of at least 1,300 birth records of people born into slavery and documented in these papers. As Hill writes of these records,

“Strategic business processes, such as systematic tracking and bookkeeping ledgers, allowed slaveholders to count and control bodies, organize them for labor, and claim them as property. By adapting legacy accounting practices to the unique needs of slave breeding the Massie family converted enslaved women into mothers, mothers into birth records, and birth records into a self-sustaining reproducing labor system that yielded wealth-building dividends. Through these practices their sophisticated reproductive labor enterprise was sustained for more than a century.”

At Duke, Hill will work with Hannah Jacobs, the libraries’ Digital Humanities Consultant, and a team of graduate research assistants, to gather and organize information about the people enslaved by the Massie family to create the Enslaved Persons Database. The database will be shared with the public as a downloadable dataset. In addition to the publicly accessible database, the team will create a Guide to the Massie Family Archive, an online finding aid for the holistic Massie collection.