Record & Image Donations

What is a Repository - and How Can Your Dontation Help?

Repositories - also referred to as archives and special collections libraries - carefully preserve  and create collections from written, visual, audible, and electronic material both past and present. Repositories ensure that these personal and family records will be available for research for generations to come.

A repository is run by professionals - archivists, curators, or librarians - whose priorities are the selection,  preservation, and the accessibile access of historical materials.  Most repositories have a collecting policy that informs their decisions about what to accept.  The emphasis of our repository is on genealogically-useful records for family histry researchers, specifically African American genealogists and family historians. Researchers - including students, professors, genealogists, journalists, and many others - may find the records you donate both interesting and of value to their work.

Your Family's Records May Hold the Key to Unlocking Someone Else's Genealogy Brick Wall - and Have Significant Historical Value.

You will find below diferent types of  personal and family records that are often invaluable to a researcher. This list, which is suggestive and not definitive, covers the wide range of documents and images that the Center for Family History at the IAAM is specifically seeking:

  • Old letters that mention family members
  • Slavery-Related Documents
    • Slave Deeds of Sale
    • Slave Lists
    • Dowry Deeds / Marriage Settlement Deeds within enslaving families
    • Plantation Jurnals / Day Books / Account Books
    • Slave Auction Ledgers / Slave Auction Account Books
    • Slave Insurance Policies
    • Slave Mortgage Files
    • Slave Hiring Out Deeds
    • Enslaving Family Probate records (Wills, Estate Inventories, Estate Accounts, Deed sof Partition, etc.)
    • Enslaving Family Personal Papers (letters, etc.)
  • African American Military Records (United States Colored Troops pension Applications, Buffalo Soldiers Service & Pension Files, African American Revolutionary War & War of 1812 Bounty Land Files + Pension Applications, Colinial and Antebellum Era African American Mariner & Waterway Service Records)
  • Black Homesteaders Land Files
  • Memoirs/reminiscences
  • Old Diaries / Personal Journals
  • Old African Amerian Family Bible reccords
  • Old photographs (Pre-1970s)
  • Family History Books / Lineage Books (must have sources and citations!)
  • Old U.S. Black Communities Photographs (with subjects and locations identified)
  • African American Funeral Programs
  • Old Vital Records for African Americans (birth, marriage, and death records)
  • Old African American Baptism / Christening Records
  • African American Church Obituaries

Contact us at cfh@iaamuseum.org to discuss donating old documents, records, and images to our digital archive.

Submitting Items to Our Archive

Donating Within the Greater Charleston, SC Area

If you live within a 90-minute drive from Charleston, you can arrange to bring the original items you would like to incude inm our digital archive to the museum where a member of the CFH team will be happy to scan them. The original document swill returned to you - and you will receive digital copies on a USB memory stick. We encourage you to bring your own USB memory stick with you (minimum of 1 Terrabyte of storage). 

If You  Live Outside of the Greater Charleston, SC Area

We can accept donations from people who live more than a 90-minute drive from the IAAM Museum. We can accept high-reolution  digital copies of the originals you would lilke to donate.  To ensure the highest quality for the digital images that are part of our archive, specifications have been provided for you below:

  • Documents
    • Must be submitted in Adobe Acrobate format
    • Minimum 600 dpi resolution quality (highest print quality)
    • The following places can scan yor doucments at a high resolution: 
      • United States Postal Service Office (use USPS.com to find your nearest post office)
      • UPS store branches 
      • Office Depot
      • FedEx Stores
         
    • Images
      • Must be submitted in .JPG format
      • Minimum 600 dpi resolution quality (highest print quality)
      • Must be the same size as the original. Please do not submit files of a small dimension
      • The original must be as clear and sharp (i.e. not blurred) as possible

Contact us at cfh@iaamuseum.org to discuss donating old documents, records, and images to our digital archive. Once we have reviewed your submisison, you will be invited to upload your donation with a completed Deed of Gift to a DropBox folder a CFH staff member will create for you.

< Previous page Next page >