Drawn largely from a diary kept by plantation owner Elizabeth O. Carter from 1861 to 1872, as well as from wills and deeds written by Carter’s family members, the Enslaved Community Database serves as a resource for those trying to learn more about their ancestry, or anyone hoping to gain insight into the other side of life on a working plantation in the antebellum South.

In September, Oatlands won the Community Blue Ribbon Award from the Loudon County Joint Architectural Review Board for their “Telling All Of Our Stories” and “Reclaim Your Story” projects, which involved the dedication of two new Civil War Trails markers: one about the enslaved community at Oatlands, and another about those who started new lives after emancipation in the neighboring town of Gleedsville. Both of those markers were informed by the information gleaned from Carter’s diary, currently on loan to Oatlands by the Carter family.

We spoke with Lori Kimball, Oatlands’ director of programming and education, about how the diary and resulting database are informing the site’s interpretation of slavery, and helping the ancestors of those who were once enslaved reconnect with their pasts.

What was the thinking behind making this database available to anyone who was interested in looking through it?

I come from more of a research background and I had done this with another project, and it just seemed like the logical thing to do. The diary is just such a rich resource. We [had been] using it a little bit to inform our interpretation about slavery, but there was so much more just basic data in there. To me, it seemed like a logical step to put it into a database. As someone who does research, I appreciate when anything is online.

It’s such a basic database, it’s Excel, it’s certainly nothing high-end, but it’s searchable, just to make it available for other researchers, and then also for anyone who is doing their family genealogy and who maybe has a name but doesn’t know of a connection to Oatlands. [The purpose was] to make it available and get it out there and hopefully learn more, and have descendants contact us.

How time-intensive was the project? How long did it take you to extract all of that information from the diary and then put it into the spreadsheet?

About a year and a half, because I didn’t focus on it solely. I didn’t sit down and spend a week on it, so it was where I had time. Sometimes months went by, but I always had a goal set for myself of finishing it in March because we were doing some other things early this year, in April.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the “Reclaim Your Story” event held at Oatlands this past April?

We combined a public event with a dedication ceremony for two Civil War Trails markers. Getting those erected are part of the Loudon Sesquicentennial Committee, and we’ve done several throughout the county. The committee, which I’m a part of, wanted to do one for Oatlands. We also referred to a sister property, the church in Gleedsville where former slaves bought land, settled in that area, and worked at night to build a church. There was a related story there -- slavery here at Oatlands, and then post-slavery in Gleedsville.

We worked for about a year on those two Civil War Trails markers. As we were planning the dedication ceremony, it grew. We didn’t just want to have people come out and lift the cover off the markers, we wanted to make it more about having family members come and having sort of a get-together. That’s why I wanted to have the database live by that time. In the couple of weeks leading up to that, we were contacted by a couple of descendants, one of whom had passed by Oatlands for many years and didn’t know of her ancestors’ association here.

We were open to the public for free that day, and we had a descendant, [writer and historian] Kevin Grigsby, who spoke. The Black History Committee from our local history genealogy library had a big display, Kevin had a big display about his ancestors, we had a food vendor, we had the diary out on display in the mansion because it’s never on display. We partnered with the archive room at the courthouse, and they brought out some documents for people to see, examples of the Free Negro Register, I think a deed of manumission, some things like that.

So that was going on all day and we had a ceremony in the tent where Kevin was the keynote speaker, we had some other speakers, and then we all walked down at the end of that to unveil our Civil War Trails marker, and then people got in their cars and drove over to the Gleedsville Church to unveil that marker. There was a beautiful ceremony in the church where different descendents spoke, and then had the unveiling by the family members.

What is the daily Enslaved Community Tour that Oatlands launched in 2013?

We offer it in the warm weather months, so we reopen to the public at the end of March, so basically the end of March until November, and it’s about half an hour. I will be using the database to totally rewrite that tour for 2016, because now we know so much as we’ve been doing more research about specific people.

The tour starts with an overview of a little bit about slavery in Virginia, because believe it or not, we do have visitors who did not know there was slavery in Virginia. We start in the greenhouse, which is where oral history tells us that enslaved individuals slept during the winter months to keep the fire going in the greenhouse. We walk out onto the property, we walk down towards our old cobblestone road because one potential spot for archaeology for the slave dwellings is down in that direction. We of course walk in front of the mansion, we talk about how it would have been during that time period, we walk toward the garden, because certainly the enslaved were caring for that garden.

One of the things we talk about is the sense of place. Something that Kevin has said -- this is a place that he can go that he knows his ancestors lived and worked, and he can touch the bricks and he can get a sense of what it looked like when they were here. We’re just going to make [the tour] much, much more about the people over the next year.

In compiling this database, did you find any information that surprised you or that you weren’t expecting?

I mentioned Kevin; his ancestors were Sophia and Jacob. Probably the most surprising entry in the diary was that Elizabeth recorded that Sophia and Jacob got married in the dining room at [neighboring plantation] Bellefield on December 25, 1862. Elizabeth left Oatlands during the Civil War and went to one of her other plantations in Loudon County because she felt safer. So, Sophia and Jacob weren’t married here at Oatlands, but they were back and forth between Bellefield and Oatlands all the time, and I think that’s true of many of the slaves -- they weren’t just based at one physical location.

But just the fact that they got married in the dining room -- we started looking into what is valid research out there about slaves getting married in the “big house.” Not that it happened all the time, but it wasn’t that uncommon for a slave owner to sort of feel magnanimous or generous around Christmastime and to allow -- even though marriage wasn’t legal -- that representation of marriage.

What kind of feedback have you heard from descendants about the database?

They’re amazed at how many references we have been able to compile. So, for example, we had members who were descended from the Day family, and Julius is mentioned over and over, as is Jacob Howard. After we took those names and looked in the 1870 census, the first time they were mentioned by last name, we can clearly see that Julius was Julius Day. Emmanuel is Emmanuel Day. We think they’re brothers. So we’re just amazed at the number of references -- and the fact that there are references to an ancestor.

We had a program here last Thursday night about Loudon women during the Civil War. We extracted some information from diaries and letters in order to do that program, so of course we did Elizabeth.

Kevin [Grigsby] told a story about an elderly woman he worked with for a while several years ago as he was writing his first book. She mentioned that her grandmother never knew her exact birthday, because she had been born a slave. She never knew what her birthday was and never knew how old she was.

And when Kevin went through the diary transcription looking for references to his ancestors, he found the notation -- Sophia had a daughter, and there was the date from the diary. He was able to go back to this elderly woman he had been interviewing and say, “I know when your grandmother was born.” That just gave everybody goosebumps last Thursday night when he said that.

I hope we have many, many more of those stories, where someone knows, “My grandmother was named Rose and I know she was born at Oatlands,” [and] they might find references to that in the diary.