Recovering Black Lives from Enslaver Archives in New York and New Jersey.
The Cowenhoven Project locates, digitizes, and shares the names, relations, and stories of people of African descent enslaved in New York and New Jersey by the Van Kouwenhoven-Conover family. Every name is first recovered from an archival document or public record — a will, a receipt, a baptism register, a federal census — then added to an open, interconnected dataset and displayed in a unique profile where descendants can discover them. This site lets you explore these people and their enslavers through interactive profiles, maps, family trees, and network visualizations. It also points to the many related projects and groups working to commemorate the lives and contributions of people enslaved in the North.
This repository hosts the project’s open data site, data.cowenhoven.org — the interactive visualizations, indexes, and (over time) downloadable datasets that sit behind the main project website.
Project website: cowenhoven.org Project lead: Christopher A. Barnes (0000-0002-9952-4378) Contact: chris.barnes@cowenhoven.org
The project’s central aim is to learn more about the people of African descent enslaved by the Van Kouwenhoven-Conover family — to move them from the margins of enslavers’ receipts, wills, and town records into the center of their own stories.
For each named individual identified in the archive, the project will create or link to a profile on WikiTree, a free genealogical website, where they can be found by their descendants. The project’s website tells their stories and connects them to the wider effort to commemorate the lives and contributions of people enslaved in the North.
This repository is published as data.cowenhoven.org via GitHub Pages.
| Asset | Live URL | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Project data home | data.cowenhoven.org | Landing page linking the project’s interactive data assets. |
| Infographic | data.cowenhoven.org/infographic/ | Project-overview infographic across NY and NJ, 1736–1840. |
| Live Family Tree | data.cowenhoven.org/family-tree/ | Interactive family tree of the Van Kouwenhoven-Conover family across nine generations (1584–1840s). Click any name for biographical details, sources, and external profile links. |
| Index of Individuals | data.cowenhoven.org/index-of-individuals/ | Searchable index of named individuals tracked by the project, with cross-references to WikiTree profiles and source citations. |
| Index of Enslavers | data.cowenhoven.org/index-of-enslavers/ | Searchable index of enslavers in the Van Kouwenhoven-Conover family who have been disambiguated and linked to the people they enslaved on the Index of Individuals. |
| Cluster Map | data.cowenhoven.org/cluster-map/ | Geographic map of Van Kouwenhoven-Conover branch and enslaver clusters across New York and New Jersey, plotting where the documented family lived and where they held enslaved people. |
| LOD Network Viewer | data.cowenhoven.org/networks/ | 3D “hero networks” of enslaved people of color and their enslavers. |
More visualizations and downloadable data assets will be added over time.
These nine archives house the original primary sources — receipt books, town records, wills, and probate inventories — containing the names and details for the enslaved and indentured individuals identified to date:
Primary documentation drawn on includes, but is not limited to, the Black Birth Book of Monmouth County (NJ); Town of Brooklyn and Town of New Utrecht manumission records; probate records, wills, and inventories (NY and NJ); the 1790 US Federal Census for Kings County, NY; New Jersey Supreme Court case files (1704–1844); New York Court of General Sessions files (1704–1844); Dutch Reformed Church baptism and membership records; and newspaper notices.
The project’s full primary- and secondary-source bibliography is maintained in the public Cowenhoven Project Zotero library and is also published on the Sources page of the project website.
Barnes, Christopher A. The Cowenhoven Project: Recovering Black Lives from Enslaver Archives in New York and New Jersey. https://cowenhoven.org
Narrative content, infographics, and data summaries published in this repository are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) unless otherwise noted.
Primary source documents themselves are in the public domain or held by their respective archives; consult each source for its applicable terms.
Researchers, descendants, and collaborators are welcome to flag corrections, propose additions, or share related materials. Open an issue via the repository’s Issues tab, or contact the project at chris.barnes@cowenhoven.org.