As Dr. Jaimie Crumley, the Old North Foundation’s new Research Fellow, explained, there were two versions of the research question for this talk. The polite version was, “How and where are Black women’s and children’s stories found in the historical records of the Old North Church from 1723-1800?” The more honest version was, “What do you do when you go to the archives earnestly desiring to find stories of Black women and children in the Old North Church’s history and instead you find piles of pew deeds, hastily scribbled notes between friends about whether a piece of gray silk might make a pretty gown, and baptism records that frequently fail to account for baptized ‘negros’ by any name other than that of their enslavers?”
The second version of this research question responds to the historical record’s failure to account for Black women’s and children’s lives. This talk considered the silences about Black women and children in the Old North Church’s archival records and shared some of the Black feminist archival reading methods that allow us to expand the legibility of archival documents. This talk was part one of Dr. Crumley’s two-part series about research methods that allow us to discover Black women’s and children’s stories in the Old North Church’s archives.
