UVA Today writer Matt Kelly has just published a summary of the research the Nau Center has conducted as part of its Black Virginians in Blue digital project. While we have done a thorough search of online and archival resources and have found more than 240 African American men from Albemarle County, Virginia, who served in the United States Colored Troops (USCT), we still have a substantial amount of work to process hundreds of service and pension records into our project database. The next step will be to continue researching the lives of these men in census and other records, including research trips to places like Missouri, Kentucky, and Ohio were many of the men ended up after the Civil War.
The Nau Center could not have made such substantial progress without the help of Worthy Martin and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), who have helped us build our database and start to design a project website. We will continue to work closely with IATH as we map the location data we have found and implement new site features.
We would also like to thank undergraduate students who have served as Sewell Fellows working on behalf of the project, Amelia Gilmer, Sarah Anderson, and Joseph Wright. Our summer intern, Jane Diamond, also did substantial work on the project and has written several essays that will appear on our blog. Finally, PhD Candidate Brian Neumann helped us locate many pension records in the National Archives.
Finally, a very special thanks to Ervin Jordan of UVA's Special Collections Library. Dr. Jordan is an expert in local UVA and Charlottesville Civil War history who has helped us from the very beginning.
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