The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities was awarded a $660,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to be used for work on an electronically-based collection of sources related to the lives of early Americans.
The project, entitled People of the Founding Era, combines a biographical dictionary and "prosopography" - a type of biography used in social history to examine relationships and connections between people and locations - to preserve those figures largely unknown to history who lived during the early 18th and 19th centuries, said Mark Saunders, manager of the Electronic Imprint of the University of Virginia Press.
With this system, "one could look up where leading attorneys in 1820s Virginia came from, and if there is a correlation between place of origin and success," said Holly Shulman, founding director of the Documents Compass group, part of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
The effort will collect information about individuals in such fields as gender, slave status and place of birth, and seeks to provide a broader view of historical figures that makes it attractive to scholars who study more obscure groups that usually are not included in other databases, Saunders said.
"We may know that a craftsman worked on the University of Virginia because he is referenced in Jefferson's papers ... We may know where he lived or how old he was ... but little else," Saunders said. "A reader may find complete entries for many individuals with whom they are not familiar and also entries missing a first or last name, or any name."
The new aggregating resource will include papers focusing on well-known figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, but Shulman expected it to eventually include as many as 20,000 people - many whose biographical details are less complete.
"We'll be taking the work of scholars who edited reference volumes and extracting various biographical statements about individuals that can be used for a wide variety of application including women's history and political and social research," she said.
Despite a lack of complete detail about such figures, these elements provide a richer background for scholars studying the period, and Shulman said she hopes it will help scholars to better envision historical relationships.
Work on the project started in fall 2008 with a staff of current and former University students, in addition to programmers and other technical employees.
Rotunda, the Electronic Imprint of the University of Virginia Press, provided key expertise for the project. The Mellon Foundation had sponsored Rotunda in the past, and wanted to extend its work by awarding the grant to the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, supporting the experienced team of Holly Shulman and Sue Perdue at Documents Compass.
Penny Kaiserlian, director of the University of Virginia Press, said her group was delighted to help with this project, and she expects "a wide spectrum of potential users," from undergraduate students, to experienced scholars in many fields, to genealogists and the public at large.
The first installment of the project is set for publication next year.
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