MARBLEHEAD — The Marblehead Museum has launched a new digital resource documenting free and enslaved people of color who lived in the town through the end of the 19th century.
This resource is available free to anyone and can be accessed through the museum’s website.
The museum’s Executive Director Lauren McCormack said this ongoing project has been in the works for about a year, trying to identify as many people as possible.
“What you see online will be added to over time as we continue to find more people,” McCormack said. “Once we find them, we conduct research on them and try to find as much as we can about them. We want to really take each individual story beyond just a name and a date to give a little narrative story to the individual.”
The stories of the individuals are included online, as well as the primary sources and documents used to learn about the person. If you click on one of the individuals, there will be links on the bottom to any documents or findings related to them.
“If one person, say an enslaved person ran away and then the ad appeared in the newspaper, then a copy of the ad will be in the database,” McCormack said. “You can really get a sense, in a different way, than just reading a narrative.”
People can browse the database to discover the stories of the Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) who lived and worked in Marblehead through the 19th century. The purpose of this database is to shed light on the diverse individuals who contributed to the Marblehead community. The entries contain numerous references to neighboring towns, particularly Lynn, Salem, and Beverly.
This project began by looking at census records to identify people of color from Marblehead. Once a name was found, McCormack and volunteers searched through sources like medical, church, tax, newspaper and land records to try to better identify the person.
“As we find out more about that person, sometimes they married or had parents or children in the area, which leads us to more names,” McCormack said. “It took about a year to get what we have now, and there are still about 100 more that need to be done (added).”
McCormack is doing the research with volunteers and is open to any others who want to help research this.
This research was then able to be put onto a website thanks to a Digital Capacities grant from Mass Humanities that allowed for a partnership with a consultant to put together the website and software.
While this is the first time the Marblehead Museum has done a project like this, McCormack said she did something similar years ago when she worked at the USS Constitution Museum and put together a database of individuals who have served aboard the ship.
“In the past couple of years when we really tried to do more work and research and disseminate our research about the diverse history of Marbehead, I thought it would be a nice way of capturing individual stories,” McCormack said.
Some of the individuals found during the research have a link to Lynn and other communities on the North Shore.
McCormack found an article from the 1830s about a woman who was captured in Africa named Flora. She was brought to Marblehead and at some point made her way to Lynn and got married and raised her children there.
“It’s actually pretty neat because it’s not really just people in Marblehead. People were moving in and out, so all of the North Shore is represented in this,” McCormack said. “Our hope is to continue to share these stories and that people will be interested and want to learn more, thinking about the way that history impacts our lives today.”
McCormack said they will be adding new names to the online database each month. This resource launched in February during Black History Month, but will stay up indefinitely.
“What we’ve really tried hard, especially recently at the museum, is Black history is American history and Marblehead’s history, so every month is Black History Month as well,” McCormack said. “We want people to visit it, to come upon it and to use it whenever, so it’s not going to come down.”
The database can be found online at bipocdatabase.marbleheadmuseum.org/.
