Library of Virginia completes five-year effort to digitize 99 ‘Free Negro Registers’ for Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative

RICHMOND, Va. – The Library of Virginia has completed digitization of 99 "Free Negro Registers" for its digital project, Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative, making the records available online for researchers, historians and the general public.

“Free Negro Registers” are records that local authorities maintained to document Black Virginians who were emancipated from slavery or born free. In 1793, the Virginia General Assembly passed a law requiring “free Negroes or mulattoes” to “be registered and numbered in a book to be kept by the town clerk, which shall specify age, name, color, stature and by whom, and in what court emancipated.” Because of their descriptive nature, these registers may provide the only surviving record of physical appearance for free Black Virginians during the antebellum period. They also provide biographical and physical evidence otherwise missing from many sources, making them a useful genealogical resource for researching Black family history. In addition, the registers document Virginia's efforts to control and regulate the movement of Black people during the early to mid-nineteenth century.

The free registers digitization effort began in 2021 with a grant of $175,392 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, which supported a three-year project for the Library to digitize all 39 registers from 17 localities housed in its own collections. Following completion of that grant-funded project, the Library expanded its efforts to include all remaining extant register books in Virginia. Through collaboration with nearly 40 circuit court clerks and cultural heritage professionals statewide and a total of five years of work, all extant volumes of Free Registers have been digitized and made available through Virginia Untold.

“The Free Registers are incredible resources of unique information about Virginians,” said Deputy State Librarian and Chief of Collections and Archives Meg Guthorn. “Digitizing these records makes them infinitely more discoverable and accessible, and the creation of the indexes was a real community effort. I'm very proud of the Virginia Untold team and all of the staff at the Library of Virginia who have contributed to reaching this milestone.”

After digitizing each volume, the Library placed the digital images on From the Page, a crowdsourced transcription platform, and worked with volunteer transcribers to index the pages of each register. The resulting transcriptions and data have been incorporated into Virginia Untold, expanding the project’s search capabilities. Data extracted from these registers has also been added to the Virginia Open Data Portal, to which the Library has contributed since 2020. The datasets are freely available for download.

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The Library of Virginia is the leading source of information on Virginia’s history, government and people. The Library’s collections, containing more than 134 million items, document and illustrate the lives of both famous Virginians and ordinary citizens. Our online resources draw nearly 2 million website visits per year, and our on-site records, exhibitions and events bring in thousands of visitors annually. The Library is located in downtown Richmond near Capitol Square at 800 East Broad Street, Richmond, VA 23219. Learn more at www.lva.virginia.gov.

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