Just launched @ Kinfolkology: Reeds Memoriam
On December 31, 1827, three men—Robert Beverly Corbin, Edward Rawle, and Francis Porteus Corbin—secured ownership of a sugar plantation on the western bank of the Mississippi River in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. Over the next several years, and as documented by the Oceans of Kinfolk database, these three enslavers trafficked 129 enslaved people from Virginia, Maryland, and Mobile, Alabama to this plantation, binding together families, strangers, and survivors of earlier migrations into a single, fragile community.
These 129 people—the men, women, and children trafficked to and forced to labor at the Corbin-Rawle sugar plantation in Jefferson Parish, LA—are at the center of Reeds Memoriam, a new database by Kinfolkology Founding Executive Director Jennie K. Williams, Ph.D.
As Reeds Memoriam documents, within a decade, nearly half of the men, women, and children trafficked to the Corbin-Rawle plantation perished there. Then, in 1837, everyone who survived was sold at auction in New Orleans—an event documented in devastating detail by notarial records included in the Louisiana Kindred database (and cited in Reeds Memoriam).
But this story is not only about brutal labor and staggering mortality. It’s also about the limits of an assumption long embedded in histories of slavery: that planter-led migrations were somehow less destructive to enslaved families than sales carried out by professional traders. Reeds Memoriam demonstrates that the violence of slavery was not confined to moments of sale or transport. It unfolded over years and over generations, through labor regimes that consumed bodies, economic systems that treated people as collateral, and forced migrations that wrought chaos and devastation.
And yet, in tracing these lives—across Virginia clay, coastal waters, and Louisiana mud—the data of Reeds Memoriam represents not only loss, but endurance, memory, and the fragile persistence of kinship against impossible odds. Many of the individuals named in this story have descendants living today.
