| EVALUATION OF UGRR RESEARCH
Aspects of work that I liked/disliked and Improvements:
Although newpspaper stripping was tedious, it opened my eyes to how acceptable and recent slavery was in Maryland. The actual runaway ads were interesting in that I could figure out how intimately the owner knew his slaves (i.e. scars, relatives, hobbies) and the possible routes by which the slaves ran away. I got more involved in this aspect of the project when we began the case studies. The case studies were overwhleming but helpful in that I had to choose from a seeming myriad of sources in order to find my subject, but it better acquainted me with the Archives' sources. I think that it would have been helpful to me to have a list of places to look for the subject of the case study, and then how to troubleshoot if I could not find him/her in the most "obvious" sources. I feel like some of my case studies are incomplete, yet I am not sure how to further my research.
Questions That The Research Did Not Answer Or Ask:
Most of the questions that occurred to me during my research related to general slave statistics in Maryland at that time, what was going on during that period of time in Maryland, and general history of slavery. Some questions: Why are we looking at these specific dates for the project?, Do we have a tally of total # of slaves who were in Maryland and how many ran?, How did the slaves come to Maryland?, Were there many free blacks who helped in the UGRR?, What was the "usual" fate of a slave who escaped or who was captured again?, How would a slave's life in Baltimore City contrast/compare to a slave's life in southern MD? Although some of these questions may seem irrelevant to the project, I think that a "timeline" would be helpful in order to provide a bit of the background and the future of slavery in Maryland around the 1850s. |
