Reference: A Welcome and Request From All Genealogy Researchers Hello, My name is Eleanor Richardson. I am the Co-Administrator of the University of South Florida Africana Heritage Project. We are a joint project of the Africana Studies and Anthropology departments at USF. Our researchers travel to transcribe records from archives, libraries and county records, before they are lost to history. Our mission is to rediscover precious records, documenting former slaves, and to make those records available, on a free public access, Internet site. Our website design is now in the final proof stage, and we are building our database. We anticipate being live at www.africanaheritage.com within the next month. We are, and always will be, 100% free to the researcher and a nonprofit, organization. We expressly forbid the use of records in our database for profit. Our terms and use conditions are identical to those of USGenWeb and Rootsweb. We gratefully acknowledge each contributor and treat each record as the precious historical document that it is. The copyright, of course, remains with you, the contributor. Our largest focus is within the genealogical community. We recognize that the majority of the records that mention slaves have actually been discovered by people researching their own ancestry. So many people have these records, and wish to share them, but are not sure how, or where. We will provide a record submission form directed to our searchable database and powerful meta-search engine. Researchers will also be able to browse the record collection. Another of our goals is to gather information from the Internet to centralize as many records as possible. To that end, we frequently write to people who have generously shared records on the Internet, and ask them for permission to include their records in our searchable database. We have had tremendous success with this approach. Some people even send us more records, after we write to ask permission to use a particular record that they have posted! To date, we have gathered more than four thousand individual records. We have already obtained written permission from many people and Websites to use Wills, Slave Schedules, Manumission Records, Ship Manifests, Church Records, Cemetery Records, Census Records, Family Bibles, Personal Narratives, etc. We are especially interested in exploring new ways to place new archive records online, while still respecting the copyright laws. We have many other sources and resources available. For the last year, our undergraduate and graduate students have been working to glean slave names and information from the Records of Antebellum Plantations, from the Revolution through the Civil War, microfilm series, ed. by Kenneth Stampp. USF owns the entire two hundred-plus microfilm reel series. We glean slave lists from these microfilms, then add background research on the slaveowners' migrations and family history. As you can see, we will not be working ourselves out of a job anytime soon! We wanted to drop you a line to let you know that we are proud to add our voices to yours in our common mission, to preserve our heritage for generations to come. Please consider us a ready resource, if we can ever assist your project in any way. I would like to extend a cordial invitation to you, to visit our new Website, explore, post and share information, if you will. (We hope to be live within a month.) Kindest Regards, Eleanor Richardson rich1735@bellsouth.net P.S. My roots are from South Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and The New Netherlands (Manhattan Island).