Hi! I’m Elle Kim, a new part-time Project Archivist for Virginia Untold: The African Narrative. In this blog post, I’ll formally introduce myself and describe what I’ve been doing in my first few months.
I recently graduated from the College of William & Mary wanting to work in archives because I enjoy connecting people to resources that can be difficult to find. As a special collections student assistant, I located and delivered materials to visitors working on research projects. Although researchers usually found what they needed, sometimes our collections had periods of time where no records or papers were preserved, which made me curious about the effects of how we keep and organize information.
My interest in the accessibility of information deepened when I completed an oral history internship with William & Mary’s Bray School Lab. There, I learned how poor preservation and access to historical records can have not only academic, but deeply personal consequences. For example, descendants of the scholars who attended the Williamsburg Bray School strive to document and honor their ancestors against a lack of robust archival material; only a few student lists have survived from the school’s operation between 1760 and 1774.
The Author in her Workspace
As a result of seeing people struggle with archival research, when I left William & Mary with a BA in History, I also left with a strong desire to help people access information; I basically jumped at the opportunity to volunteer for Virginia Untold, a project which breaks down barriers to African American genealogical and historical research by indexing and digitizing records to be searchable online. As a volunteer during the summer of 2025, I updated a list of which records had already been scanned for certain localities and practiced indexing different record types. Since becoming a part-time staff member in March, I’ve worked mainly on the deeds project. I inherited this project from Ed Jordan, longtime processor for Virginia Untold who retired last October.
Since enslaved people were considered the property of their enslavers, local court clerks rarely indexed the names of enslaved people in deed book entries. Instead, their names are often captured in loose deed papers that are difficult to access in the archives. The goal of the deeds project is to therefore examine sets of these property records and separate the records containing the names of enslaved and free Black and Multiracial individuals. After rehousing the records, we process each deed, index it for names and important keywords, and digitize the document so it will be searchable by name and other metadata through our online database, Virginia Untold. At the time of writing, I have been processing bills of sale and deeds from Albemarle County.
I indexed just shy of one hundred names from this deed and related records detailing an enslaver’s estate division. Notice how the court clerks only labeled these records with the names of the enslavers. The fact that enslaved families could be divided between new enslavers also makes African American genealogical research difficult. Indexing these names addresses both challenges to access.
Even though reading cursive, organizing documents, and piecing together ripped parchment can be tedious work, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to contribute to Virginia Untold and the Library of Virginia by promoting access to information. Personally, knowing that this work will help people connect with their ancestors and chart their family trees makes the challenge more than worthwhile.
Archival work is also vital to engage with slavery and racism’s continued impacts; as Lydia Neuroth wrote in her first blog as Project Manager, what gets preserved in and accessed from the written record shapes our understanding of the current historical moment. As I work through the rest of the deeds project and dive deep into other collections, I look forward to increasing our knowledge of both Virginia’s past and present by surfacing more untold stories from the archives.
