NC county deed books help build database of enslaved people

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The story of how a young Black woman named Eliza came to live — and work — on a plantation in eastern Wake County in 1841 might have been lost to history if not for property deeds.

Eliza was an enslaved woman, one of at least 14 enslaved people who toiled for the family of Benton and Burchett Williams on what is now known as Oak View County Park in Raleigh. Her arrival at the Williamses’ farm was noted legally as the transfer of an asset, a gift to Burchett from her father, William Powell, because at the time, enslaved people weren’t considered people, but property.

The Wake County Register of Deeds office, Shaw University and other professional and volunteer historians are now working to decipher more than 30 deed books that have been digitized and put online to glean information about people such as Eliza. Ultimately, the information will go into an online database that will include high-resolution images and full-text searchable transcripts the public can use for genealogical and other research.

Similar work, begun as a three-year grant-funded project at UNC-Greensboro and the North Carolina Division of Archives and Records, is underway in 26 North Carolina counties. Organizers hope it will spread to all 100 counties and become a model for other states, part of a larger process that might humanize what some historians say has become an abstract concept from a distant past.

“They were people,” Dr. Erin Moore, executive director of Shaw’s Center for Racial and Social Justice, said at an event at Oak View Thursday announcing the new phase of the project. “They had hopes and they had dreams.”

In addition to university students who might help do the work as part of class projects, volunteers are invited to help read through deed books looking for...