Wethersfield Historical Society is proud to announce the upcoming publication of the online database Free and Enslaved People of Color in Wethersfield 1634-1848 on February 20. Join WHS in the Rotary Room of the  Keeney Memorial Cultural Center (200 Main Street) at 5:00 pm for a reception celebrating the culmination of decades of research. The database features the lives of African Americans and Native Americans in Wethersfield from 1634 (the town’s founding) until 1848 (the formal end of slavery in Connecticut). The society offers this database free of charge as a public service to anyone who visits its website. The database is a great resource for teachers, historians, or anyone curious about Wethersfield history. WHS hopes that this database will inspire future research and writing that will shed even greater light on the lives of Wethersfield’s people of color.

At 5:00 pm, Museum Educator, Gillie Johnson will give brief demonstration of the database followed by a short presentation acknowledging the efforts of all who had a hand in its creation. Light refreshments will be served afterward.

While Leonard Chester has long been celebrated as one of the 10 Adventurers who established Wethersfield in 1634, he was also one of Wethersfield’s earliest enslavers. When he died in 1648, he owned an enslaved African American woman. Little is known about this woman’s life, not even her name, yet a record of her is listed in Free and Enslaved People of Color in Wethersfield 1634-1848. She was likely one of the first, if not the first, enslaved person in Wethersfield. Over the next two centuries, hundreds of African Americans would live in Wethersfield.

Wethersfield Historical Society is committed to bringing their stories out of the shadows. For decades, research librarian Martha Smart and independent researcher Diane Cameron have traveled to archives all around Connecticut searching for any scraps of information they might find about early Wethersfield’s people of color. They uncovered information about over 1,000 free and enslaved African Americans and Native Americans who lived in Wethersfield between 1634 and 1848. In order to share this important history with others, WHS staff has spent the past few years compiling this data from original handwritten records and references and organizing it into Free and Enslaved People of Color in Wethersfield 1634-1848.