About this Project

Historian Marie Tyler-McGraw's research on Virginia's role in the African colonization movement resulted in the book An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), but much of the information compiled on Virginia emigrants to Liberia remained unpublished. Rather than have this material languish in files, she wanted to make her research available to others. She enlisted the help of historian Deborah Lee to develop a database of Virginia emigrants to Liberia and emancipators. Partnering with the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County, they obtained a grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities to expand the database with additional sources. In 2006, the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia agreed to develop and host a website that would include the database and additional supporting materials. The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities continued its generous support and the website, Virginia Emigrants to Liberia, launched in 2008. It included a searchable database of nearly 3700 Virginia emigrants to Liberia and nearly 250 Virginia emancipators and supporting resources.

In 2022 and 2023, the Institute for Advanced Technology (successor of the Virginia Center for Digital History) partnered with Deborah Lee and researcher Jane Ailes, with Marie Tyler-McGraw as an advisor, to recreate the website with greatly expanded capabilities. The National Endowment for the Humanities funded the project with a Humanities' Collections and Reference Resources award. The website increases access to the voluminous Records of the American Colonization Society (ACS) held by the Library of Congress with digitized images freely available on Fold3.com. Our reference material includes original ship manifests, personal letters by and about emigrants and those who assisted them, courthouse records, local newspapers, ACS publications, etc. If an image of a document is available online, a URL is included in the citation. At launch, this dataset includes 3,753 emigrants, 63 potential emigrants, 220 slaveholders who released emigrants for Liberia, 19 emancipators who also filed deeds of manumission, and 47 facilitators.

Of special interest, data citations on individuals include URLs for about 500 original letters and other documents by and about emigrants from western Virginia counties that together became West Virginia in 1863. When more funding becomes available an effort will be made to add letters and other documents for the remaining Virginia counties. But for now, these WV counties are an example of the richness of the documents available in the ACS collection at LC and from other resources.

Together, these resources illuminate family and community life across the color line on both sides of the Atlantic, as people wrestled with issues of daily life, slavery and freedom, race and citizenship. They are rich in information that is scarce on Black individuals in that era, including surnames, ages, family relationships, occupations, literacy, religion, enslavers' names and localities.