Racial Restrictive Covenants Project: Recent Updates June
Happy Summer and Happy Juneteenth!
Juneteenth also known as “Emancipation Day” or “Freedom Day” commemorates the end of slavery in the United States after the Civil War. On June 19th, 1865, 250,000 slaves in Galvaston, Texas were informed that they were free by legal decree, officially releasing the last remaining stronghold to freedom. Juneteenth holds important cultural significance as both a celebration of freedom for the Black community and a reminder of the racial injustices that are still prevalent today.
Volunteer Updates
We would like to thank you for subscribing to our newsletter and for volunteering your time either in person or on Zooniverse. Although we have been slow to upload new files to Zooniverse in the last couple months, as we’ve been working with physical records at various archives around the state, Zooniverse is going to be a key part of our research moving forward!
As of this week, we have had 1,087 volunteers help us on Zooniverse. Thank you all so much for contributing to this work. We couldn’t do it without you!
We want to give a huge thank you to the student volunteers at Issaquah High School for all their hard work last month.
We would also like to thank the wonderful student volunteers who have come in each week to the University of Washington libraries to read restrictions on King County microfilm.
Currently in Zooniverse, we have property records from Pierce County and Lewis County to transcribe. This summer, you can expect to see even more from Lewis County and lots of new records from King County as we move into the process of digitizing King County records.
If you are working in the Lewis County module, a lot of the documents will not have restrictions in them – don’t worry! After we OCR documents, we use a keyword search to find possible restrictions. Sometimes words like “white” or “Black” return other results and lead to false positives. It is completely possible that some of the documents don’t have restrictions.
As you work to transcribe documents on Zooniverse, if you have any questions feel free to use the Talk Board on the Zooniverse website, or send us an email at wacovenants@gmail.com. We are available for questions and eager to help!
Mapping Updates
Our maps of King County have been updated to include over 2,000 more restrictions. Although King County is still in the research stage, so far, we estimate 34,000 parcels were racially restricted across Seattle and its suburbs. We would not have been able to update the King County maps without the dedicated work of our in-person volunteers and Zooniverse volunteers. We can now proudly say 1,087 wonderful volunteers have helped us research on Zooniverse!
We now have preliminary maps of Kitsap County live on our website! We estimate that over 2,300 parcels of land were restricted in Kitsap County in roughly 69 different subdivisions. Thank you to Sophia, Sam, and Erin for traveling to Bellevue each Friday to flip through over 400 books of Kitsap County property records. Thank you to the archivists at the Puget Sound Regional Archives for being so accommodating and retrieving all 400 of those books for us. (They are heavy!)
In addition to Kitsap, we have also published preliminary maps of Island County. Sophia traveled to the Northwest Regional Archives in Bellingham to complete the research and found just over 1,000 restrictions in 22 subdivisions.
If you haven’t checked them out already, we also have preliminary maps of Pierce, Snohomish, Whatcom, and Thurston live on our website. Maps of Skagit County will be coming very soon. After we finish our map of Skagit County, our Puget Sound map of restrictions will be filled in and we will begin work on some of the smaller counties on the Peninsula and Coast.
As we move into summer, we are hoping to continue giving educational presentations and hosting Zooniverse transcription sessions. If you are part of a community organization or company that might be interested in a presentation, please send us an email at wacovenants@gmail.com. If you have already volunteered in the past, we are more than happy to schedule another event. The community is an integral part of this research.
And lastly, two members of our team Sam Cutts and Colton Schons are departing and moving on to new things. We want to thank both of them for their dedication to the project and their wonderful work over the last year. We wish them both the best and can’t wait to see what they do next.
Learn More About the Project
Racial Restrictive Covenants Project