CML work appears twice in the newest Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (JSDP). The journal's September 2025 issue (Volume 6 Issue 3) features articles by doctoral student David Armstrong, co-authored by CML Director George Oberle. and faculty affiliate Sheri Ann Huerta, PhD. An online academic journal produced alongside the website "Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade," at enslaved.org, JSDP publishes articles about the transatlantic slave trade researched through pioneering digital scholarship, focusing on the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants into the early twentieth century, making them accessible to researchers and the public through an interactive online repository, now including these works sponsored by CML.
Huerta, a public historian, wrote about creating the Valuing Enslaved Lives dataset using information from the unusually complete probate records of Virginia's Fauquier County. She describes "Valuing Enslaved Lives in Fauquier County, Virginia, 1798-1865" as a longitudinal approach to the study of enslaved families and communities, the economics of the domestic slave trade, and the relationship between age and commodified value in a slave society. Her research combed thousands of archived pages of county probate records to locate biographical data on people held in bondage. She began the project during her dissertation research in 2014, after noting that such information was absent from traditional indexes of probate archives; their failure to list names of people listed as assets makes it harder for descendants and scholars to research historical Black Americans.
With financial support from NEH and mentorship from CML, Huerta compiled biographical data for nearly 3,500 enslaved individuals and families from 242 distinct county probate record—appraisals, inventories, estate allocations and related sale accounts—to fulfill the "Enslaved Lives" part of her project title. For the "Valuing" component, she included searchable economic data revealing the pertinence of age, gender, and health factors to the commodification of enslaved men, women, and children. Including information from not just inventories but also estate sales, Huerta writes, makes in possible in some cases to trace subjects' paths after they were separated from a decedent's estate. The project also helps reveal enslaved people's connections to historical events and, for a VA250 project of the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County, helped identify more than 300 enslaved individuals who lived during the Revolutionary War era.
In their article, People Enslaved by the Mason Family of Virginia, 1773-1865, Armstrong and Oberle describe how they compiled a dataset from wills, estate records, inventories and newspaper advertisements tied to George Mason IV and his heirs, housed in archives across the state. Sometimes called the "forgotten founding father," Mason is known more for his ideas about rights and the U.S. Constitution than his role as a patriarch and planter who enriched himself and his descendants through ownership of people. From voluminous documents kept to document and track that wealth, Armstrong has indexed names and biographical details of nearly six hundred of those enslaved by Mason and dozens of family members in Virginia and Maryland. Conceding that slaveholding data themselves are, almost by definition, dehumanizing, the authors write, they hope nevertheless to turn them to good: "We hope that by gathering and analyzing these details, we ... can help to restore some of the personhood to the generations of people enslaved by the Mason family of Virginia."
A PhD candidate in history, Armstrong sees his thoroughly cross-indexed dataset as not just a resource for historians and genealogists to research slavery in Virginia from the 1760s through 1865, but as a lens on the paradox behind the beliefs that famously led Mason to pen the Virginia Declaration of Rights. First compiled while a graduate research assistant for CML, the research will inform Armstrong's dissertation examining the Mason family's role in furthering U.S. imperial ambitions. His preliminary findings show how slaveholding served them as a strategy for enhancing wealth and power in the early republic—a phenomenon apparent in one of his earlier digital history projects, "'Not Satisfied with the Provisions Made for Her': Elizabeth Mary Ann Barnes Hooe, the Mason Family, and the Transfer of Property in Early Virginia," showing the important role of White family ties in building wealth.
It was through contact with CML that Armstrong came to this dissertation topic. Already considering a study of state government during the Revolution, he recalls, he began wondering how to use information on the Mason family acquired during his CML summer projects. "I envision my dissertation as an extension of my work at CML," Armstrong said, "and I am very thankful for the encouragement of Dr. Oberle and the CML team that helped me identify an innovative and manageable dissertation topic."
October 17, 2025