The Washington University Libraries, in partnership with the Missouri History Museum and other contributors within and outside Washington University, digitized, transcribed, and encoded the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project and supplementary materials. Additionally, they developed extensions to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for encoding legal documents to reflect legal function, genres, and roles, and employ these extensions in this collection. The resulting extensions and guidelines serve as the basis for a new standard for encoding legal documents.
The cases in the St. Louis Circuit Court Historic Records Project, especially the suits enslaved people brought against their enslavers are important historical documents. Creating a full-text searchable collection of these documents and enhancing their use makes these documents significantly more accessible to a wider range of audiences and provides new means of understanding the roles of enslaved people, lawyers, abolitionists, the state of Missouri, and others involved in these cases.
The project has been moved to a temporary home after the retirement of the original project infrastructure in 2022. All the documents can be searched and browsed through Washington University in St. Louis’ digital repository. Plans are underway to build a new website with advanced search functionality to take full advantage of the legal encoding work.
The original project sites may be accessed through the Internet Archive through the links below. Please be advised that the original sites' search function is not included in the archived version.
