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GREENSBORO — Deloris Williams wasn’t expecting much when she stumbled upon UNCG’s Digital Library on American Slavery.

The Illinois grandmother had spent a few years tracing her roots to a family of free black people in Warren County, N.C., but she hadn’t been able to find evidence about a particular line before 1850. She decided to type in a few surnames and see what popped up. One petition yielded a big clue.

“In that petition, I recognized the name Mourning Ivins — which is another way of spelling Evans — which is my family,” Williams said in a recent phone interview.

UNCG’s Digital Library debuted in September and contains the names of more than 83,000 slaves from 15 states and the District of Columbia. The online archive offers a glimpse into the personal lives of slaves, their owners and free blacks from 1775 to 1867 through county courthouse and state legislative records.

It is the culmination of 18 years of work by longtime UNCG professor Loren Schweninger, the university’s Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor in History.

“Originally, the interest was simply that this information had never been seen by historians, never been used by historians, never been brought to light,” he said.

Each petition includes an abstract of legal cases, including marriages, divorces and property disputes among slave-holding families.

The full documents can be found on microfilm at UNCG’s Jackson Library and other college libraries.

Schweninger received various grants to fund the Race and Slavery Petitions Project, which he started in 1991. UNCG contributed $60,000 to help get the project online, Schweninger said.

During the early years of the project, Schweninger spent days on the road researching courthouse records. “They were just so interesting,” Schweninger said about the stories they revealed.

He uncovered one such case while looking through records in Bourbon County, Ky., in 1994. A female slave had been put up for sale to pay off a debt. She was sold for 50 cents because of her age and “decrepitude.”

The buyer was a guy named Stampy.

Schweninger could imagine men standing around the auction block joking about the slave. But with such a large volume of cases to work through, Schweninger didn’t give himself time to get upset. “You couldn’t really stop and feel bad,” he said.

The petition project also shined light on white people’s attitudes about slaves, Schweninger said, and what they were ultimately viewed as: property.

“The average estate of a slave holder was 60 percent held in human chattel,” he said.

A link to the past

While scholars are likely to find the digital library a fascinating tool, it was designed just as much with people such as Deloris Williams in mind.

“One of the features of the digital library is we have created not family trees per se, but linkage between families,” said Nicole Mazgaj, an associate editor with the Race and Slavery Petitions Project.

She said as much information as possible about the petitioners was entered into the database, so as to connect slaves to their relatives and to owners and plantations, making genealogical research simpler.

The library can be searched using names as well as a host of listed subjects, such as free black slave owners, elderly slaves, murder, and education and literacy.

It can also be searched by year, state and keyword. There are tools such as a glossary to help site visitors with their search.

But the digital library is not a panacea, Mazgaj said. “All I can say is that it is the best thing available now to connect slaves, their families, their owners, and make some sense out of it.”

A narrow view of slavery

For every family connected, Marguerite Ross Howell would like to see a mind broadened about the institution of slavery.

“The digital library is much, much broader, in my opinion, than just genealogy,” Howell said.

Before joining the project as a senior associate editor, Howell said her view of slavery was pretty narrow: auction blocks, runaway slaves, the Underground Railroad. What she called a “Gone with the Wind” perspective.

“I never knew that there were warranties on purchases of enslaved individuals. I never knew that enslaved individuals were wedding gifts,” she said. “The petition project brings it home. The wealth of information in this project is immense and eye-opening.”

Howell encourages anyone who visits the site to search for family members to explore other topics.

“If I were a high school teacher, I could find a way to use this,” she said. “If I were a screenwriter, there are some petitions that would make incredible screenplays.

“I think it’s just important for people to realize they’re going to learn a lot about the institution of slavery.”

Contact Jonnelle Davis at 373-7080 or jonnelle.davis@news-record.com