Overview

This page organizes language use, editorial methods, and additional standards throughout the project. DASFAM's unique structure pulls from multiple sources to develop a comprehensive controlled vocabulary and documentary editing approach, including the Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series (PTJRS), University of Virginia's On These Grounds (OTG), and Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org). As this project is still under development, the standards outlined below will continue to change as we invite feedback from the descendant community, historians, genealogists, researchers, and other topical experts.


People

Status: Category identifying a person's legal or social standing, on a spectrum of bondage to freedom. Referenced from Enslaved.org.

  1. Enslaved Person: Person whose body, labor, and reproductive rights are owned by or fall under the dominion of another person or organizion in a social or legal system of involuntary servitude.
  2. Free Person: Person who is not enslaved (but may have been born to enslaved parents or freed by rights of free soil, abolition laws, or some other manner).
  3. Emancipated Person: Person who was at one point enslaved and subsequently manumitted by self-purchase or by acts of the former enslaver, a judge, or the state.
  4. Indentured Person: Person who is a servant or ward whose labor and service are bound to a person or organization for a fixed term, sometimes under a contract, including as collateral against a debt.
  5. Enslaver or Owner: Person or organization who owns or has dominion over the body, labor, and reproductive rights of another person in a social or legal system of involuntary servitude. Includes former enslavers, concessionaires, and overseers.
  6. Liminal Status Person: Person in an indeterminate, intermediate, or transitional status between servitude and freedom (i.e., dependent children born to the free womb; enslaved persons extended conditional liberty or promised future manumissionl; orphaned minors) or who has escaped bondage but neither lives nor is legally recognized as free or freed.

Physical Description: Field documenting a person's physical description, race, or complexion as represented in historical records. These terms are never imposed by the editing team and only included when the person is referenced as such in archival material (such as a census, newspaper ad, letter, military record, etc.)


Enslaver(s): A field within a Person Record that accumulates enslavers who, at one point, held dominion over the body, labor, and reproductive rights of that person. This includes enslavers to which a person was hired out for a period of time.


Project Use Name: The name that is used to distinguish and identify a person. This is what appears at the top of a Person Record and when hovering over a Person Tag. Includes their first name, maiden name, surname, birth year, and death year when known. I.e. Exmund (b.1809) and Edith Hern Fossett (1787-1854).


Relationship Certainty: In some cases, it is assumed through research and contextual evidence that two people have an established relationship, but there is no defining evidence to prove it beyond all doubts. In these cases, this distinction will be noted as:

[Likely Person] Higher certainty. These relationships are generally understood as plausible by researchers and/or the descendant community but cannot be directly linked to an oral history or document.
[Possibly Person?] Lower certainy. These relationships may be discovered through contextual evidence but cannot be directly linked to an oral history or document and have room for doubt.

Surname Extensions: While established surnames are used for some families at Monticello, many of these people do not have a defined source to indicate they used this surname during their lifetime. Yet their connection and membership within the family is honored by genealogists. To help connect family names across generations, surnames can be extended to relatives. If a parent has a surname attached to a source, their children may also use this surname. If the assumed surname extends more than a generation, it will be displayed within brackets. This may also be applied in reverse to supply a surname to a parent.


Undiscovered Names: There are some individuals whose names have not yet been identified. They may have died during infancy, were sold from Monticello or Poplar Forest before their name was recorded, or the records were destroyed or lost. People with a currently undiscovered name are referred to as "Unknown" and follow all other naming conventions when possible, including family surnames and life dates.


Documents and Events

Event Type and Subtype: Categories that group events of a similar nature or theme. Each event type is associated with numerous Event Subtypes. This value is what is displayed at the top of each Timeline event. Referenced from OTG. DASFAM will continue to modify, add to, and remove items from this list as needed.

  1. Commercial: An event in which a person is part of a transaction that involves the buying or selling of goods, services, or labor. Includes:
    1. Appraisal
    2. Hire
    3. Inventory
    4. Loan
    5. Services
    6. Small Goods
  2. Education: An event in which a person is being educated. Includes:
    1. Learning
    2. Teaching
  3. Status: An event in which an enslaved person is part of a transaction that changes their status or ownership. Includes:
    1. Dispute
    2. Emancipation
    3. Enslavement
    4. Exchange
    5. Freedom Seeking
    6. Manumission
    7. Sale
    8. Transfer
  4. Health: An event in which a person is ill or undergoes a major bodily issue, sometimes requiring attendance from a healthcare provider. Includes:
    1. Childbirth
    2. Illness
    3. Injury
    4. Medical Treatment
    5. Pregnancy
    6. Vaccination
  5. Intra-Community Conflict: An event in which enslaved people are in conflict with one another. Includes:
    1. Physical Altercataion
    2. Theft
    3. Verbal Altercation
  6. Labor: An event in which a person is performing some kind of work. Includes:
    1. Agricultural
    2. Artisinal
    3. Domestic
    4. Manual
    5. Midwifery
    6. Providing Treatment
    7. Sex Work
    8. Teaching Assistant
  7. Life Event: An event that is part of the normal course of a human lifetime. Includes:
    1. Birth
    2. Burial
    3. Death
    4. Grandparenthood
    5. Marriage
    6. Parenthood
  8. Membership or Participation: An event in which a person joins or participates in a group. Includes:
    1. Fraternal Organization
    2. Military
  9. Mention: An event in which a person is noted in an unspecified way, e.g. corresponence that notes an encounter. Includes:
    1. Description
    2. Disappearance
  10. Provisions: An event in which small goods or housing are distributed, usually by an Enslaver or Owner. Includes:
    1. Clothing
    2. Food
    3. Housing
    4. Supplies
  11. Relationship: An event in which a person is mentioned solely because of their relationship to someone, usually as an identifier. Includes:
    1. Child
    2. Family
    3. Grandchild
    4. Grandparent
    5. Parent
    6. Partner
  12. Religious: An event in which a person participates that is religious in nature, sometimes involving the presence of a member of the clergy. Includes:
    1. Attends Service
    2. Baptism
    3. Communion
    4. Confession
    5. Last Rites
    6. Marriage Sacrament
    7. Music
    8. Ordination
    9. Preaching
  13. Resistance: An event in which an enslaved person takes action to resist their status, treatment, or condition, or that of a patriot. Includes:
    1. Appeal
    2. Defense
    3. Freedom Seeking
    4. Physical
    5. Property Appropriation
    6. Property Destruction
    7. Work Slowdown or Stoppage
  14. Social Interaction: An event in which a person engages with another person outside of the context of a work-related interaction. Includes:
    1. Celebration
    2. Ceremony
    3. Dancing
    4. Drinking Alcohol
    5. Gambling
    6. Games and Sports
    7. Gathering
    8. Music
    9. Visit
  15. Travel: An event in which a person moves from one location to another, sometimes at the behest of an owner or trader. Includes:
    1. Importation
    2. Relocation
    3. Temporary
  16. Violence:An event in which an enslaved person is involved in a violent altercation with a non-enslaved person. This includes violenct acts against an enslaved persons by enslavers, owners, overseers, or other authority figures. Includes:
    1. Capture
    2. Harrassment
    3. Jailing
    4. Medical Experimentation
    5. Perpetrating
    6. Physical Assault
    7. Postmortem Abuse
    8. Punishment
    9. Sexual Assault

Role: Specifies how a person was involved in an event. This is typically only needed in cases where their involvement cannot be determined by the other data fields provided, particularly within the following Event Types: Commercial, Status, and Intra-Community Conflict. Some of the following roles group the sale or transfer or people and goods together only because the type of transaction occurring will always be specified by the Event Type.

  1. Appraiser: A person or organization who assigns monetary value to an enslaved person.
  2. Hirer: A person or organization who employs, hires, or takes guardianship of an enslaved person's labor or services for the financial benefit of an enslaver or owner.
  3. Hiring Out: An enslaver or ornwer who temporarily relinquishes the labor or services of an enslaved person to another person or organization for financial benefit.
  4. Borrower: A person or organization who temporarily takes guardianship of an enslaved person's labor or services without monetary compensation to the primary enslaver.
  5. Loaner: An enslaver or owner who temporarily relinquishes the labor or services of an enslaved person without monetary compensation.
  6. Buyer: A person authorized to purchase an enslaved person or commodities, goods, and services.
  7. Seller: A person authorized to sell an enslaved person or commodities, goods, and services.
  8. Acquirer: An enslaver or owner who receives ownership of an enslaved person without a monetary exchange between enslavers.
  9. Transferor: An enslaver or owner who relinquishes ownership of an enslaved person without a monetary exchange between enslavers.
  10. Perpetrator: A person who is accused of carrying out a violent or harmful act.
  11. Victim: A person who was allegedly harmed through a violent act by another person.
  12. Witness: A person who was not directly involved in an event, but their presence has an impact on the outcome or significance of an event.

Textual Devices

The following devices are employed throughout transcriptions to clarify the presentation of the text:

[...] Text missing and not conjecturable.
[  ] Number or part of number missing or illegible.
[roman] Conjectural reading for missing or illegible matter. A question mark follows when the reading is doubtful.
[italic] Editorial comment inserted into the text.
<italic> Matter deleted in the manuscript but restored in our text.