Georgetown University, once rooted in slavery, created a website which shows a genealogy of descendants of the 272 African American slaves sold in 1838 for the benefit of the Jesuit college (the predecessor of Georgetown University).
The Georgetown Slavery Archive presents relative material about the Maryland Jesuits, Georgetown University, and slavery. This project was started in February 2016 led by Professor Adam Rothman, Professor Marcia Chatelain, and Mattew Quallen, etc.Richard J. Cellini, a Georgetown graduate who founded the Georgetown Memory Project which is the overarching project of this website.
Using the data collected from Maryland Province Archives of the Society of Jesus, Booth Family Center for Special Collections, and Georgetown University Library, the project staff edited all the information, and presented it in a website. There are various formats to access the document, including PDF, Podcast, and video.
Also audiences can search the documents on the map. For example, this image shows a list of slaves that notes where they came from, when they were born, other biographical notes, and the site of the list. If I want to discover more, I can click the blue underline and see the PDF document. The map function is really intuitive and useful.
This website is open access. Living descendants of the people who were owned by Jesuits can still get in touch with the working group and add new information. Moreover, the multi-dimensional access also provides great opportunities for the audiences who are willing to discover the history of Georgetown.
