The Texas Runaway Slave Project (TRSP) is a database of runaway slave advertisements, articles and notices from newspapers published in Texas.
The Texas Digital Newspaper Project and the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America websites show that there are at least 12,000 issues of available Texas newspapers (1813-1865) that may contain runaway slave materials.
The Texas Runaway Slave Project is systematically researching and aggregating runaway slave advertisements, capture notices and articles from 3 sources:
1. Digitized Newspapers –The University of North Texas hosts two platforms, The Texas Digital Newspaper Project (https://tdnp.unt.edu/) and the Portal to Texas History (http://texashistory.unt.edu/), which have, at present, over 7500 issues scanned and searchable from Texas newspapers prior to 1865. The TRSP received a grant in 2014 from the Summerlee Foundation that funded six students to research 4,700 of the digitized issues. The project manager of the TRSP researched an additional 2,600. There are still about 200 German-language issues that need to be reviewed from the Portal. The TRSP team also researched all 300 issues of the Dallas Herald available through the Library of Congress.
2. Microfilmed Newspapers – This research is ongoing. The project manager is finishing up newspapers available at the East Texas Research Center and then moving onto those available through interlibrary loan.
3. Original Newspapers –Institutions with major collections of pre-1865 Texas newspapers include the University of Texas at Austin, the Panhandle-Plains Museum in Canyon, Texas, and Yale University. These will be researched last.
The website has 40 fields, as well as a JPEG image and transcript for each runaway.
This project is ongoing. Instead of waiting for a complete dataset, the team decided to get the research thus far collected out and available to users.
