The Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans will partner with HistoryForge on two related projects during the first testing year of this partnership. In the first project, the Midlo Center will use the HistoryForge platform to link census data with historical maps and addresses from two New Orleans neighborhoods, the Iberville and the Tremé-Lafitte areas, both of which have been profoundly transformed by urban renewal projects in the twentieth century. The areas are of considerable importance in the city’s history. They encompass Storyville, New Orleans’s semi-legal red light district from 1898 to 1917, famous as the birthplace of the city’s distinctive style of jazz; the Tremé neighborhood, often referenced as one of the oldest Black neighborhoods in the United States; and the Carondelet Canal area, once a thriving commercial zone linking water-borne commerce with a developing African American middle class of skilled workers in the building trades. As these neighborhoods have also been the subject of large-scale archaeological data recoveries in recent years, the HistoryForge platform potentially provides a new interpretive tool to link people in the past with both addresses and archaeological assemblages, and to make this information available to the public.

In a second regionally-focused project, the Midlo Center will transcribe wage laborer lists compiled by the Louisiana Freedmen’s Bureau from former plantations just after Emancipation, and then utilize these as a bridge to later census data in select Mississippi River parishes. The Midlo will coordinate with a broad range of community partners in this effort, with an initial emphasis on select former plantations and post-Emancipation freetowns in St. John the Baptist and Plaquemines Parishes. This is intended to create a new tool for those researching genealogy, population movements, and ancestral African American cemeteries in the area. It will align with efforts to link unmarked and/or newly identified cemeteries with descendant populations currently underway by the Midlo and its partners.