Resources and Materials

This digital exhibit only represents a small, selective portion of the Sanders-Bullitt Family Digital Collection, and that digitized collection itself only represents a fraction of the entire Bullitt Family Papers-Oxmoor Collection. The entire digital collection is also on Omeka, and can be found here. 

You can access the finding aid for the entire Bullitt collection here.

While researching, our team sought guidance from a number of resources made by fellow public historians and archivists that we would like to credit.

 The most influential of these is the Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia (A4BLiP) association and their Anti-Racist Metadata Resources document, published in 2020. This document was immensely valuable to this project and we hope to continue referencing the work of A4BLiP in future initiatives. You can access this document on their website or at the following link.

We have also consulted the "Engaging Descendent Communities in the Interpretation of Slavery" rubric from James Madison's Montpelier, a document made in partnership with National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African-American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. This document was created by and for public historians during the National Summit for Teaching Slavery, held at Montpelier in February 2018. Furthermore, this digital exhibit was inspired by The Naming Project, also founded by the historians and researchers behind Montpelier. You can learn more about the summit, and download the rubric, at this link.

If you'd like to learn more about the changes the Filson is making in our cataloguing, accessioning, and preserving practices to become better advocates for marginalized histories, the following two articles written for History@Work describe the reasoning behind our ethical metadata.

Another resource referenced during this project was The Reckoning podcast, produced by Dan Gediman, Loretta Williams, and Nancy Rosenbaum, which featured much of the Filson's materials and nurtured a conversation between descendants of people enslaved at Oxmoor and the ways our society has yet to reckon with the legacy of slavery. You can access the podcast, along with other educational materials on the history of enslavement in Kentucky, by clicking this link.

You can also watch a short lecture about these materials on The Filson Historical Society's YouTube channel.

For descendants of enslaved peoples across Kentucky, the African-American Genealogy Group of Kentucky may be helpful when researching your own family history. They were founded in 2011 in Frankfort, Kentucky, and have countless other resources that can aid you in your search. Throughout the pandemic, they have also provided virtual lectures and workshops over Zoom. You can view their calendar of events, peruse their databases, and/or become a member at www.aaggky.org/.

Special thanks to Shirley Harmon, now curator at the Oxmoor Farm, for cataloguing this massive collection all those years ago. The only reason that this digitization project was possible was because of her work in noting the names of enslaved people while cataloguing, knowing that it would be useful one day. Thank you.

If you would like to provide feedback, or if you have any questions, comments, concerns, we would love to hear from you. Please contact us at research@filsonhistorical.org.