Beyond Avalon: slavery, memory, and the ground beneath a university.

As a student researcher on UAH's "Slavery, Memory, and the University" project, I conducted archival research at the Huntsville/Madison County Public Library, analyzed physical, intellectual, and institutional traces of slavery, and prepared data for the Locating Slavery's Legacies database.

What the project asks

• Who was enslaved at Avalon, and what can the archives still tell us about their lives and kinship networks?
• How did one family's wealth and power accumulate across two centuries — from a colonial Virginia plantation to a North Alabama campus?
• What does a university owe to the history beneath its foundations?

How I work

• Primary sources first: deeds, wills, inventories, census and slave schedules, chancery court records, Freedman's Bank registers.
• Databases, not just narratives: every claim logged, sourced, and status-marked — verified, unresolved, or ruled out.
• Public history: the research is built to be shared — papers, talks, digital exhibits, and maps.

Current threads

• Reconstructing the enslaved kinship networks around the Jones and Perkins families in Madison County.
• Tracing the Jones family's economic world: land, mills, and the open question of transatlantic connections.
• A close reading of the 1850 and 1860 census slave schedules — including what ambiguous enumerator marks can and can't tell us.
• Conference proposal in progress: "Beyond Avalon: Reclaiming the Jones-Perkins Enslaved Kinship Network through Digital Public History."