The peculiarities of the Dartmouth College schedule meant that there was roughly a month-long hiatus in on-campus project work on Georgia Black Lives. The gap was more than filled by two especially active transcribers, who appear as “From the Page collaborators” MaryV and Carol Ann. Their contributions pushed us close to the completion of the first 300 uploaded documents and roughly doubled the transcribed lines, which now approaches 22,000. Wow!
As work has recommenced here in Hanover, a team led by two “returning” summer students have staked out three main objectives. We will, with the aid of newcomers, go back through all the transcriptions for additional edits and indexing (our subject headings are growing all the time) of the first 300 items. We plan to upload an additional seventy or so documents in the next couple of weeks and these will focus particular attention on the dynamics of the Reconstruction period of 1865-1870. We plan two more uploads of seventy documents by the end of the 2023-24 academic year, which will represent a tally of more than five hundred transcribed works.
Finally, we will be executing additional capsule biographies, adding two to four pages meant to complement those already posted about George Stephens and Ben Travis. For starters, will likely bring into focus the matriarch Betsy Stephens (married to Bob, one of the men known by Alexander since boyhood) and the shattered lives of a trio of enslaved women Venus, Rody Jordan, and Harriet Blackwell.