Furman University
Recovering the lives behind the archive.
A research and teaching laboratory where students and scholars use deep archival work and digital methods to restore the names, kin, and lives of the enslaved.
A research and teaching laboratory where students and scholars use deep archival work and digital methods to restore the names, kin, and lives of the enslaved.
A research and teaching laboratory that pairs patient archival work with digital tools to recover the lives of the enslaved — and trains undergraduates to do that recovery themselves.
Students learn to read a will, walk a census, and trace a family across decades, then bring what they find into searchable archives, historical maps, and carefully transcribed records. The Lab's founding subject is the Columbia Seven and the world of the Zealy daguerreotypes.
1870
1850
1845
1825An interactive sequence that layers historical maps of South Carolina's Richland District — the 1825 district survey, the 1845 and 1850 plats of the Taylor lands along the Congaree, and the Columbia of 1870 — to set the seven and their kin in the ground they knew, and to trace it as it changed.
Explore the map →In March 1850, in Columbia, South Carolina, seven enslaved people were photographed by Joseph T. Zealy at the request of the Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz — through the Columbia physician Robert W. Gibbes — to argue a theory of separate racial origins. The Lab's founding work restores what slavery tried to take: their names, their kin, and their lives.
The Zealy daguerreotypes are among the most contested images in American history. The Lab foregrounds biography over spectacle, works alongside descendant communities and partner institutions, and grounds each portrait's story in rigorous historical research. Names follow the project's own corrected record — including Dinah, long misread as "Drana."
An Omeka collection gathering the documents that reconstruct seven lives — census pages, wills, church rolls, and the 1866 Taylor contract — each item transcribed and annotated.
Enter the archive →The documentary trail behind The Bondwoman's Narrative and the identification of its author, Hannah Bond — the first novel written by an enslaved woman.
Learn more →A mapping project tracing Delia Taylor across the South Carolina landscape at four moments — 1834, 1852, 1858, and 1870 — from a plantation inventory to a household of her own.
View the map →The archival continuation of Seeking Abraham — recovering the enslaved people bound up with the University's founding and its original Fairfield County campus.
About the project →Wills, deeds, probate files, censuses, church and benevolent-society records — read closely and cross-checked against one another.
Genealogical reconstruction in partnership with the International African American Museum's Center for Family History.
Omeka archives, GIS mapping, and careful transcription turn scattered documents into a durable, searchable record.
Students work in Claude for Education, using Cowork to transcribe and analyze sources — always under scholarly discipline and citation.
The Lab launches in fall 2026 with FYW 1296: Picturing Slavery, the first course to put students inside the Columbia Seven research. We welcome students, descendant families, archivists, and partners.
Write to gregg.hecimovich@furman.edu to learn more, share a family connection, or collaborate.
