Crouse came across the idea for the project one day as she was re-scanning images of old deeds that were not clear. She started reading some of the documents she was scanning and became intrigued by the information contained there. She realized that the names of slaves contained in those hundreds of documents were not indexed, making it nearly impossible for people to find information about specific slaves unless they looked through all of those pages.
So Crouse started jotting down information about the slaves listed. There were a lot of slaves whose names were not listed, Crouse said, and only about half a dozen of those named had a last name listed.
Crouse said people have come to the register of deeds office over the years trying to do genealogy research including slaves. She said, “But if they don’t know who owned them, they might never find them.
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