Illuminating Hidden Lives: Bringing African American Stories to Life

FAIN: TA-296570-24

Cliveden of the National Trust, Inc. (Philadelphia, PA 19144-1925)
Carolyn Wallace (Project Director: June 2023 to present)

Support for continued efforts to reinterpret a historic house and its relationship to the African American story in Pennsylvania and beyond.

Illuminating Hidden Lives: Bringing African American Stories to Life will broaden and deepen the work of two previous successful grant projects. Phases one and two between 2021 - 2023 digitized and made accessible online documents from the Chew Family Papers focused on the lives on enslaved African Americans. Findings were shared during public programs during each stage. This next phase will help bring some of these stories to life and further promote the digitization with a goal of connecting people of African descent with their histories. Additional documents will be digitized, but the focus is on increasing metadata and transcriptions to make the documents more usable. The African American Genealogy Group will continue to help with transcriptions and interpretation. The final piece will be two short videos with first person interpreters sharing the stories from the documents. These videos will be used to promote access and to connect with families linked to these histories.