Digital resources related to the study of the Atlantic African diaspora

Mainland North America

Lost Friends: Advertisements from the Southwestern Christian Advocate
https://www.hnoc.org/database/lost-friends/index.html

Two dollars in 1880 bought a yearlong subscription to the Southwestern Christian Advocate, a newspaper published in New Orleans by the Methodist Book Concern and distributed to nearly five hundred preachers, eight hundred post offices, and more than four thousand subscribers in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. The “Lost Friends” column, which ran from the paper’s 1877 inception well into the first decade of the twentieth century, featured messages from individuals searching for loved ones lost in slavery. This searchable database provides access to 2,450 advertisements that appeared in the Southwestern Christian Advocate between November 1879 and November 1896. Digital reproductions of the Lost Friends ads are courtesy of Louisiana State University Libraries Special Collections, Hill Memorial Library.
Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery
http://informationwanted.org/

Last Seen offers genealogists and researchers a new tool for telling family stories of separation and survival during slavery, emancipation, and Civil War. The site offers easy access to thousands of “Information Wanted” advertisements taken out by former slaves searching for long lost family members. The ads taken out in black newspapers mention family members, often by name, and also by physical description, last seen locations, and at times by the name of a former slave master.

….The Shoals…

Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga

Home

During the Paxton massacres of 1763, a mob of white settlers, so-called “Paxton Boys” murdered 20 unarmed Conestoga People in a genocidal campaign that reshaped Pennsylvania settlement politics. Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga reimagines this difficult history through an educational graphic novel that introduces new interpreters and new bodies of evidence to highlight the Indigenous victims and their kin.

 

 

Caribbean

FIRST BLACKS IN THE AMERICAS
The African Presence in The Dominican Republic
http://www.firstblacks.org/

First Blacks in the Americas is a fully bilingual (English and Spanish) digital educational platform devoted to disseminating sound historical information about the early presence of people of black African ancestry in the first colonial society of the Americas of modern times, the society of the colony named La Española (‘The Spanish One’) by the Spanish colonizers when they arrived in 1492 and throughout the sixteenth-century. This is the same society that, over a process of roughly three hundred and fifty years of settlement and creolization, would evolve into the Dominican ethnicity and Dominican nation, and which we know today as the Dominican people and the Dominican Republic, respectively.