Thousands of pages of slave transactions discovered, made available to public

Bibb County Superior Court Clerk Erica Woodford found the documents in 2013 after they were collecting dust for 190 years

BIBB COUNTY, Georgia (41NBC/WMGT) – More than 6,000 pages of slave purchases in Macon-Bibb County are now available online, after they were collecting dust in the Bibb County Superior Court for almost 200 years.

“I cannot articulate in words the feeling of finding records of slavery in our deed books”, Erica L. Woodford, Esq, said.

Woodford is the first Black person to be elected as Bibb County Superior Court Clerk. She’s also the one who discovered the documents tucked away about 100 feet from her office.

Woodford found the documents in 2013, less than a year after she was elected to the post. She says she was doing a routine inventory check when she realized the deed books had thousands of pages of slave transactions.

“I saw ‘Harriet,'” Woodford said, describing the first record she came across. “Age eleven. Fair complexion. long straight hair. Warranted to be sound and well for $225.”

After Woodford found the documents, she says she went to work on creating a dream team that included the Assistant Bibb County Superior Court Clerk Stephanie Woods Miller and Mercer University Director of Africana Studies, Dr. Chester Fontenot, Jr. The trio began working on ways to not just go through the documents themselves, but to form a way for the rest of the community to have access to them.

Now, that methodology is available online for anyone to view. Woodford has called the initiative ‘Enslaved People Project.’ It’s an online portal that gives anyone access to the same documents Woodford found a decade ago for free.

“See that slavery actually existed, maybe find our ancestors, and do genealogy projects,” Woodford said, describing what her hopes are for people who visit the portal.

Woodford says though these documents are rooted in Macon history, it should be shared with the entire world.

To visit the website, go here: https://recordhub.cottsystems.com.