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Many years ago a Vermont historian named Tom Bassett stored
a shoe box of census information about African Americans in
Vermont, compiled one winter when he was very lonely. The shoe
box sat in Tom's study for decades until he loaned the box
and its contents to Elise Guyette. Elise took the box to the
Center for Rural Studies at UVM where they helped her place
the information into a computerized database. The original
Bassett database contained interpretative information, based
on historical assumptions that could be reasonably made by
looking at the collection as a whole.
Elise saw his data and started asking questions of her own.
She went back to the original census documents and started
adding information. She also created some extra categories
made from her interpretation of the census data. Her queries
led to a masters thesis about African Americans in eighteenth
and early nineteenth century Vermont.
The online database presented here offers some of the information
from the original census data. The terms used are the original
words of the US
Census Bureau. Prior to the 1820 census, people were coded
as "White" or "Other" and labelled as "Free" or "Slave." The
original coders of this database made the assumption that "Other" meant
free men and women of African descent. Their rationale was
based on the knowledge that, as non-citizens who did not pay
tax to the US government, Native Americans would not be listed.
Because the database is incomplete, it provides a place to
start looking for more information in local and state records.
The University of Virginia has prepared an Historical
Census Browser for data from 1790-1960. Contemporary data
is available from the United
States Census Bureau.
'African Americans in Vermont'
Database
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