The Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Magnolia Plantation and Gardens in Charleston, SC has agreed to fund a sister website to Africana Heritage called Lowcountry Africana. The website will debut in March of 2008.

Lowcountry Africana will be entirely dedicated to records that document the family and cultural heritage of African Americans in the historic rice-growing areas of South Carolina, Georgia and extreme northeastern Florida, an area that scholars and preservationists have identified as a distinct culture area, home to the rich Gullah/Geechee culture.

Past scholarship has documented the cultural ties between Gullah/Geechee descendants and the people of West Africa. Ongoing research conducted by the USF Africana Heritage Project suggests that the Lowcountry Southeast is also a unique family heritage area where enslaved communities were remarkably stable over time, due in part to the specialized rice-growing skills enslaved people brought with them from Africa.

The Lowcountry Africana website will be a treasure trove of primary documents, book excerpts and multimedia that further document and explore the dynamic cultural and family heritage of the Lowcountry Southeast.

Access to the entire content of Lowcountry Africana will always be 100% free. Website features will include:

• Searchable database of primary historical documents of interest to genealogists, historians and other scholars

• Key Archive pages: a place where archives with major holdings on Lowcountry plantations can share birth, death and other records of enslaved people and communities

• Key Researcher pages: a place where key Lowcountry researchers share content of their choosing with readers

• Sponsored Family Foundation Pages: a place where major slaveholding families share plantation records

• Family tree files (GEDCOM files) containing information on family lineages constructed from plantation records, with associated documents, photographs and multimedia. Readers will be able to download family files and print custom reports to build books on their family's history.

• WPA slave narratives, indexed and fully searchable

• Book, film and music excerpts from key researchers of Gullah/Geechee heritage

• Searchable name indices from books on Lowcountry history and genealogy, to help researchers target useful resources

• Photo gallery of historical Lowcountry photographs

• Teachers' resources and lesson plans for using the primary documents on Lowcountry Africana in the classroom.

• Free membership that will provide readers with an online storage locker for their favorite Lowcountry Africana and Internet content, for fast retrieval

• A custom Internet search engine geared to search only sites with content pertaining to the Lowcountry

• Lowcountry Lives: an area of the website where we tell life stories, both remarkable and mundane, of slaves, freedpersons and enslaved communities of the Lowcountry

• Feature of the Month: an area of the website where we highlight documents or photographs of interest, an article about a particular aspect of the Lowcountry African American experience, or newly discovered archives

• Family Stories: a page where readers can share and preserve family history and memories

• News items of interest to researchers of all things Lowcountry

• Forums/message boards where readers can interact and share research and advice

• Conservation Efforts: a place where readers can learn about efforts to preserve Lowcountry cultural resources and landmarks

• Links Page with referrals to related Internet resources

• Blog – an informal online journal where we share the ins and outs, highs and lows of our archival research, and share new insights gained from ongoing research

Magnolia Plantation and Drayton Hall were home to the Drayton and Grimke families of Charleston. The Drayton family is not only sponsoring Lowcountry Africana, but also opening their family archives for study and interpretation.

We will reconstruct the lineages of Drayton family enslaved communities and enter the lineages into family file software. This research is one component of "From Slavery to Freedom," a comprehensive interpretive center for African American history that Magnolia is now developing.

Our goal is to make Lowcountry Africana the definitive research guide for tracing African American ancestry in the Lowcountry.

How You Can Help:

We will be gathering records from South Carolina, Savannah, coastal Georgia and St. Augustine for the website's searchable database. We will cherish you and every record you share with us for the Lowcountry Africana website. You can send them directly to us at info@africanaheritage.com

What's next: Thanks to the Magnolia Plantation Foundation's generous support, we get to build this wonderful website and load it up with useful information. And we get to meet the Drayton family freedmen's descendants and join them in discovering the names and lives of revered ancestors.

We are profoundly grateful to the Magnolia Plantation Foundation for sponsoring this exciting research and website.

Stay tuned for more details about Lowcountry Africana and how you can get involved!

Related Press Coverage:

Insight Into Slave History: Project Will Put Names With Faces by Brian Hicks, Charleston Post and Courier