Uncovering Their History: African, African-American and Native-American Burials in Hartford’s Ancient Burying Ground, 1640-1815

Project Details

The Ancient Burying Ground is Hartford’s oldest historic site and the only one remaining from the seventeenth century. From 1640 until the early 1800s, it served as Hartford’s primary graveyard. Our "Uncovering Their History" website is devoted to research about and remembrance of colonial Hartford’s least visible population: the Native, African, and African-American people who lived, worked, and died here. The site profiles over 500 people of color buried in Hartford, complete with genealogical trees via Ancestry.com and RelationshipTrees, developed by Central Connecticut State University, to show relationships of people to their communities.

Subjects or Themes

African American, Indigenous, Early America

Project Language(s)

English

Time Period

Geographic Location

Project Categories

Content Type

Text, Images, Networks, Teacher Resources

Target Audience(s)

Creators

Dr. Katherine A. Hermes, Director of the Project, Professor of History, Central CT State University
Sharon Clapp, website manager, Digital Resources Librarian at Central CT State University

Year(s)

2018-2019

Host Institution / Affiliation / Project Location

Ancient Burying Ground Association (of Hartford, CT)

Software Employed

Labor and Support

The Ancient Burying Ground project took 9 months to complete, and was supported by a grant from the Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office. Team members conducted archival research in the CT State Library and the Hartford Public Library's Hartford History Center, and the Burritt Library at Central CT State University. Some research on the slave trade was also completed in archives in Newport, Rhode Island. We also used online, digitized resources. We created an Ancestry.com tree for each named person we could find, and we created RelationshipTrees for a large number of the people for whom we had the most details of their lives. RelationshipTree took two semesters to develop and was a project in two courses at CCSU; it is not exclusive to the Ancient Burying Ground Project, but was critical to it.