The New York Times has published an interesting article by Rachel L. Swarns about the life of a slave who was sold by the Jesuit college, now known as Georgetown University. He was then shipped to Louisiana and would survive slavery and the Civil War. He would live to see freedom and the dawning of the 20th century. One thing is unusual about this man: pictures of him still exist today.
The photos had been stored in the archives of the Ellender Memorial Library at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La., not far from where Mr. Campbell was enslaved.
Clifton Theriot, the library’s archivist and interim director, made the connection late last year after stumbling across an article in a genealogical quarterly about the Jesuit slaves who had been shipped to Louisiana. He was startled to see Mr. Campbell’s name listed among them.
He reached out to Judy Riffel, the author of the article that had inspired his search through the archives. She is the lead genealogist for the Georgetown Memory Project, a group founded by Richard J. Cellini, a Georgetown alumnus, to identify the 272 slaves and their descendants.
You can read more about this project in the New York Times at: http://nyti.ms/2lUqgjm while more information about the Georgetown Memory Project may be found at: http://www.georgetownmemoryproject.org/.
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