The story of the African Americans of the Kentucky Borderlands began simply enough. Find stories of Underground Railroad history in Boone County, Kentucky and tell those stories along a 60-mile bus tour of the county. What started as a simple task soon morphed into a complex narrative of the African American experience throughout the Kentucky Borderlands region. We found the information about the enslaved was hidden in plain sight among many primary historic resources, such as church records, and we struggled to bring all of the information together to create one cohesive narrative.
The African Americans of the Kentucky Borderlands database attempts to simplify the complexities surrounding the African American history of the Northern Kentucky region using a relational data structure. The database project consolidates the information into one cohesive platform which allows the data to speak for itself and captures the essence of the lives of enslaved African Americans in historic Northern Kentucky.