CHARLESTON, S.C. - Descendants of slaves who toiled at Magnolia Plantation and nearby Drayton Hall will soon be able to trace their roots through an online archive thought to be one of the first of its kind.
The Lowcountry Africana Web site goes up in March, the same time the renovation of a row of slave cabins at Magnolia is expected to be completed.
There are other Web sites dealing with genealogy and slavery. But the new site, funded by the Magnolia Plantation Foundation, will focus on the descendants of slaves and freedmen who worked at the plantations owned by the Drayton family on the winding Ashley River just west of Charleston.
"This is the first time a former slave-holding family has reached out to descendants of the families they formerly enslaved in this way," said Toni Carrier, the creator of the site. "Particularly by opening up the plantation records for study, interpretation, and for descendants to connect with enslaved ancestors."
Ms. Carrier is founder of the Africana Heritage Project at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
The Lowcountry site "is an entirely new way of looking at this history, and no one has put this lens on it before," she said.
"We see this as a crucial addition to what we are doing with the cabin project," said Taylor Drayton Nelson, the director of Magnolia.
There were slaves at Magnolia from the time it was established by the Drayton family in 1676 - six years after the founding of Charleston - until the end of the Civil War in 1865.
In the 1800s, the plantation had about 45 slaves at any one time, according to the Magnolia Web site.
The estate list of Thomas Drayton included the names of several dozen slaves. His son, John, inherited about a third of them and brought them to Drayton Hall, where the main house was completed in 1742, according to the Drayton Hall site.
The Lowcountry Africana Web site will be associated with the Africana Heritage Project. That volunteer research project at South Florida now offers an online archive of 4,000 documents, pictures and files describing the lives of slaves.
Volunteers comb libraries and plantation journals, church records and oral histories for information.
The site also allows people to submit their own records and pictures.
"This documentation scattered throughout the South," said Eric Duke, who teaches in the school's Department of Africana Studies. He said many libraries are beginning to archive material on computers.
"They are actually helping to preserve the records more, not just make them more available. It's just the matter of the oils on peoples' hands touching a document that destroys it," he said.
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