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@marcomarcos
Another notable recent death, her son wrote this yesterday
“Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (June 27th, 1929 - August, 29th, 2022) was active at every level in the Civil Rights movement. She did amazing work in Digital humanities uncovering the lost lives of 107,000 slaves.
Dr Hall was a renowned historian of African culture and contributions throughout the Americas. Dr. Hall's book, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, is considered the seminal book of Afro-Creole history and has received numerous awards.
Perhaps Dr. Hall's most monumental work is her contributions to the field of African American genealogy. Hall built the Louisiana Slave Database composed of 107,000 entries documenting the people enslaved in Louisiana from 1719 with the arrival of the first slave ship directly from Africa to 1820 when the domestic slave trade from the East Coast became the almost exclusive supplier of slave labor to the Lower South. Hall found the names of the enslaved people in official documents located in parish courthouses, the notarial archives, the Old US Mint, the public library in New Orleans, the state archives in Baton Rouge and university special collections.
Beyond plantation inventories and criminal cases, Hall also identified enslaved people in wills, marriage contracts, leases, seizures for debt, mortgages of slaves, and reports of deaths. Whitney Plantation's Alles Gwendolyn Hall is named in her honor and contains the 107,000 entries found in her database. The database has helped thousands of African Americans find ancestors, connect families, and trace cultural roots.”
The Whitney Plantation is well worth a visit if you’re ever in Louisiana.