In collecting, curating, and analyzing vast quantities of data derived from the archives and advertisements of enslavers and slave traders, we seek to turn the original purposes of these records on their head. The primary focus of the project is on recovering the names and stories of Black families decimated by the Second Middle Passage while creating a resource for contemporary Black families seeking to reconstruct their own history. While it is true that many advertisements treat men and women as nameless lots, thousands more do not. Advertisements for sheriffs’ sales for debt, for instance, are of enormous importance because they routinely name individual enslaved people, identify their enslavers and location, and frequently provide evidence on occupation. These advertisements are especially important since they are often the only extant record of sheriffs’ sales (and even when manuscript sheriffs’ records do survive they are usually incomplete and hard to access). A great number of sheriffs’ advertisements also focus on the sale of named unclaimed runaways, again providing important personal details. Advertisements for trustees’ sales also routinely identify and give brief details about individuals. Advertisements for probate sales often (but not routinely) provide the names of individual enslaved people (again with brief personal details).
To Be Sold seeks as its primary charge the documentation of huge numbers of enslaved people, including the names, trades, skills, ages, and family relationships of people not often show in manuscript probate court inventories, appraisals, and sales records. To Be Sold also datafies huge numbers of advertisements for private sales, which are often, again, the sole surviving source where no corresponding legal record survives or was ever made. It should be noted too that although advertisements placed by inter-state traders did not typically name individual enslaved people—instead making general announcements of ‘Cash for Negroes’ or ‘Fresh supplies of Virginia Negroes’—recovering the names of particular traders at given dates and locations may provide crucial links to other sources that will help in the process of piecing Black family histories together.
