Digitising documents at the parish church of Our Lady of the Miracles of São João do Cariri in São João do Cariri, Paraíba. Photos by David and Tara LaFevor. All rights reserved.
The personal histories of enslaved and oppressed peoples are notoriously difficult to access. This is especially true of people who lived in earlier historical periods, since information on their lived experiences usually come via third parties, such as foreign travellers writing about slavery for European audiences, or by way of court cases, where their voices are only faintly heard. These sources are essential to understanding how slave societies worked, but they too often reduce the enslaved to a nameless and faceless crowd. While documents about the lives of the enslaved and free people of colour do exist, they tend to be hard to find and can often be in an advanced state of deterioration. We need these documents to create human historical narratives and to understand how individuals justified, resisted, accepted, and fought against enslavement and other forms of social oppression.
This piece considers one increasingly important method of bringing the lives of the invisible to light: the digitisation and dissemination of archival historical sources related to slavery and its afterlives. I draw upon personal experience arising from two research projects in the state of Paraíba, Brazil. The first project successfully digitised 266 ecclesiastical and secular documents stored at three institutions: the Waldemar Bispo Duarte Historical Archive; the Paraíba Historical and Geographical Institute in the coastal state capital of João Pessoa; and the Church of Our Lady of the Miracles of Saint John of the Cariri in the town of São João do Cariri in the interior of the state. The project digitised many types of documents, but the most exciting are the baptismal, marriage, and death records, which list the names and places of origin of the free, freed, and enslaved, as well as early land grants from the Portuguese government that describe the terrain in great detail.
