Washington D.C. Emancipation Repair Project

Over 1100 compensation petitions identified Washington D.C. slaves by their "age, size, complexion, health and qualifications," before their emancipation in 1862.

However, this information has yet to be indexed for digital, search queries.

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Project Background

In April 1862, under the Washington D.C. Compensated Emancipation Act, all enslaved people in the District of Columbia were immediately freed.

The enslavers had ninety days to submit a petition, which consisted of a preprinted form, in order to receive reparations for the loss of property rights to the African American people they had enslaved.

Press play to learn how National Archives preserved these documents.

Repairing Historical Records

Since 2013, the petitions have been made available under the Civil War Washington digitization project.

The petitions, however, are only searchable by the names of slaveowners, not the names of the 3,100 Black people listed in the petitions.

This project aims to repair these historical records by manually indexing the names, ages, and family relations of those emancipated people.

Names of Emancipated People

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Special Thanks

We are incredibly grateful to the volunteers that have contributed to this project with the assistance of the National Archives and Archaeological Analytics.