Newport Historical Society

The Newport Historical Society will use funds to hire a full-time research assistant to continue work on its database of records representing black and Indigenous individuals. Since this work first began in 2021, the society has identified and recorded more than 1,700 names of people of African and Indigenous descent from the archives. The research assistant will continue the review of the collection, digitize records, create biographies of African, African American, and Indigenous people who lived and worked in Newport during the era of slavery, and make these resources available to the public through the society’s online database, allowing researchers and the public to better understand the city’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and serve as a tool for descendant communities to research their ancestors.