Now Seeking: Volunteers for Louisiana Kindred

Kinfolkology hopes to hire six to eight volunteers to work on Louisiana Kindred, Kinfolkology’s database of enslaved African American ancestors who were sold in antebellum New Orleans.

Background Info

Kinfolkology Exec. Director Jennie K. Williams began work on what is now known as Louisiana Kindred in 2019 by compiling a dataset of information drawn from notarial records documenting the sales of approximately 1,000 enslaved people in New Orleans between 1820 and 1860. In 2023, that dataset became the basis for a new online database published @ Kinfolkology as “Louisiana Kindred.”

In part, the name “Louisiana Kindred” is intended to gesture toward the fact that the individuals whose names appear in this database (and all Kinfolkology’s databases) were and remain members of families and communities. But the name “Louisiana Kindred” has another meaning, too; it references the fact that New Orleans was a site of spectacular violence against African American kinship – a place where relatives and loved ones were routinely torn apart from each other by traders and other enslavers.

Since its launch in 2023, Louisiana Kindred has expanded to include information about nearly 2,000 enslaved African American ancestors who were sold in New Orleans in the forty years before the Civil War. But there is so much more work to do. That’s why we’re asking for help.

Volunteers must be able to read nineteenth-century handwritten documents. Volunteers must also be willing to learn how to input data using Kinfolkology’s data entry interface. But don’t worry! We’ll provide all the training you need.