On Friday June 28, 2019 from 12-2 p.m.  the New Jersey State Library, in partnership with Freedom on the Move, will host a Hack-a-Thon in honor of Juneteenth, the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States.

Freedom on the Move (FOTM), an online project devoted to fugitives from slavery in North America, is enlisting the help of the public to create a database for tens of thousands of advertisements placed by enslavers who wanted to recapture self-liberating Africans and African-Americans.  Participants in State Library’s Juneteenth Hack-a-Thon will join forces to contribute transcriptions to this project.

Participants are welcome to come and transcribe ads anytime during the event! Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops.  The State Library will be providing limited computer equipment for the event.

The insights the ads provide into the experiences of enslaved Africans and African-Americans are especially valuable because so little information about them as individuals has been preserved. The output of this crowdsourced project will be a growing database of thousands of individuals, and the places and people associated with them. This in turn will be an invaluable research aid, pedagogical tool and resource for genealogists, classes and individuals.

For additional information and registration, click here. (Registration is required for the event due to limited space and computer equipment.)