People
Featured Stories
This database contains thousands of individuals—including enslaved, manumitted, and free people of African and Indigenous descent, enslavers, and slave traders—who lived and worked in Newport during the era of slavery. While the documentary record is often fragmentary, for some of these individuals we can paint a more detailed picture of their lived experiences, livelihoods, and webs of association. These records will be continually updated as we study the documents in our archive to recover the stories of Black and Indigenous Newporters.
Explore People By
Use this section to narrow down your search by using gender, race, and freedom status as filters. You can also Browse all People & Organizations to use the additional filters of occupation, age, and role.
Explore Events By
An event is any major occurrence in an individual’s life that is reflected in the documentary record: births, marriages, baptisms, voyages, enslavements, emancipations and more. Use this section to explore different event types, or Browse all Event Types to filter by year, person/organization, and location.
About This Project
Voices from the NHS Archives is an expansive research project that centers Black and Indigenous experiences recovered from the manuscript collection at the Newport Historical Society. This database contains highly searchable digital records that will allow members of the public and researchers alike to easily navigate some of the documents in our collection to explore the lives and stories contained within. The online database incorporates church records, business papers, ships logs, colonial medical records, census records, custom house records and more; it is constantly updated as research continues.
To learn more about the database and research process, click the button below.
The development of this project was made possible by a grant from the van Beuren Charitable Foundation.
Enslaved.org: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade served as the guide and inspiration for the ontology and concept of this database.