Research
With each selected subject, we perform research into genealogy as well as the life, environment and times they lived. After assimilating and establishing the context from an African American perspective, our intent is to engage institutions of education and local municipals to help in disseminating a broader context regarding their lives.
Below are the subjects we are currently researching.
Fortune & Dinah
RESEARCH COMPLETE - Fortune, his wife Dinah and their 3 children were enslaved by Preserved Porter, a Connecticut bone doctor. In 1798, Fortune slipped from a rock on the west bank of the Naugatuck river, broke his neck and drowned.
Prince Mortimer
RESEARCH COMPLETE - In the early 18th century, a child was captured in Guinea, taken from his parents and brought to New England by ship amongst excrement and filth. He was assigned the name Prince.
Thaddeus & Mary Newton
RESEARCH COMPLETE - 1833, in New Bern, NC, a free black woman named Mary Heritage married her love, an enslaved man named Thaddeus Newton. Thaddeus was enslaved by Peter and Catherine Custis, relatives of Robert E. Lee. The couple would have kids, but because Thaddeus was enslaved, Mary would have to make her own way, listed in the 1840 census as owning her own home.
Isaac J. Hill
RESEARCH COMPLETE - Isaac was born in Selinsgrove, PA in 1826. He was one of 11 children of Isaac and Rachel Hill. Being poor, his father bound Isaac out to a Kentucky man when he was a young boy, only to be sent back to his parents when White Americans discovered he had learned to read. While back in Pennsylvania, Isaac would become a minister in 1852.