By AJ Bucy

As a Sharpe Community Scholar, I received the significant opportunity to collaborate with the William & Mary Bray School Lab this past spring semester. As part of the growing Sharpe Action Research Pathways (ARP) program, I chose to volunteer as a Student Thought Partner. This is how I first learned about the school while working under Bray School Lab Assistant, Nicole Brown. My role included reviewing and transcribing eighteenth-century documents in relation to the late 1700s school.

The most meaningful work I contributed at this time were my tertiary reviews of the Fredericksburg letters of the Associates of Dr. Bray. I read specific letters and accounts detailing the process of founding another school, used the Transkribus software to transcribe, and afterwards converted each text into Word Document where I then reformatted the letters to be published for the public.

Reading these historical letters not only sharpened my transcription skills, but it also taught me how influential the Williamsburg Bray School was on its “sister” school in Fredericksburg. At the end of the year, I co-presented at the ARP research symposium alongside other Student Thought Partners who worked with the Bray School Lab. I proceeded to inform William & Mary staff and students on the Bray School and the lab’s mission. It was a great opportunity to collaborate with my peers and get the community more informed about the historical school.

Moving forward, I knew my intentions were to use my proficiency in transcribing to continue uncovering unheard voices from the Bray School and further my studies in African American history. So, I applied for the 2024 Charles Center Summer Research Grant to continue my discoveries with the lab. And I wanted to specifically shout out my work with each staff member and share my favorite memories.

With the lab’s genealogist, Elizabeth Drembus, I conducted independent research in the Special Collections of both the Earl Gregg Swem Library and John D. Rockefeller Library. One of my proudest accomplishments as an intern occurred when I analyzed five hundred pages of eighteenth-century documents and letters from household names in Williamsburg: the most prominent being the Blair and Dawson families. The Special Collection folders that I read in Swem Library contained information on enslavers and the enslaved. I took note of those children who could have possibly attended the Bray School at any time over its fourteen years. I also looked at the York City County Project at Rockefeller’s Special Collections, searching through Blair family records in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The experience taught me how to complete proper documentation of my findings using an Excel Spreadsheet and the basics of genealogy.

With Tonia Merideth, the lab’s oral historian, I learned how to professionally transcribe interviews. From watching videos on the importance of oral history and the rules of American transcription, to finishing first, second, or third pass reviews of interviews, I learned why oral history is one of the most important forms of historical preservation and advocacy. I am grateful to have heard twelve invaluable stories primarily from Bray School descendants and Colonial Williamsburg interpreters.

Throughout this internship I was fortunate to collaborate with the Bray School Lab’s Director, Maureen Elgersman Lee, to build my work schedule and weekly tasks. This experience was unique as I got to have consistent input on what I wanted to accomplish in my research, enabling me to devote myself to the process and lose myself in the work. Additionally, I received the opportunity to table and participate in the third annual Descendants Day at James Monroe’s Highland. As a first-time attendee, I had a truly memorable experience. While there, I was able to learn about and connect with other organizations that also work to uncover the history of descendants in the community. Additionally, it was special to hear about and support Highland’s plans to further help descendants connect with their heritage.

Later in June, I was able to table twice for the Juneteenth holiday. My first tabling experience for Juneteenth was at William & Mary in the Sadler Center. This was special because I got to speak to faculty about the importance of the school and share my developed interest in historical research. The second festivity was in the Williamsburg community where I helped promote the websites and social media platforms of the Bray School Lab to help Williamsburg residents stay connected with the ongoing research.

As a first-year undergraduate student, I am beyond grateful for the opportunity to have this partnership with the W&M Bray School Lab. I plan to continue to foster my academic interest in Africana studies by taking courses in that field this fall.

Even after more than two hundred and fifty years, the buried voices of Bray School students become clearer every day. It has been an honor to be a part of such a remarkable project.

AJ Bucy ’27 is a prospective English and History double major. She is a member of Orchesis Modern Dance Company, CHAARG Women’s Workout Group, and Botany Club, who continues as a 2024-25 Student Thought Partner for the William & Mary Bray School Lab.

By Cecilia Weaver

I first began working with the William & Mary Bray School Lab as a Student Thought Partner in the spring of 2022. At the time, I was a sophomore who had entered college during the fall of 2020, and I was interested in engaging in the research opportunities available on campus. I also wanted to make up for lost time due to remote classes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hearing about the Bray School Lab at its inception has allowed me to witness its incredible growth and play a part in the work that the Lab has been able to produce over the past two and a half years. 

During my first year at the Lab, I created an annotated bibliography of sources about the Williamsburg Bray School and the broader history African American education in Williamsburg. As the history of the Bray School was still new to many people in the community, this annotated bibliography provided accessible scholarly and news sources for people who wanted to learn more. My experience with the annotated bibliography provided an incredibly valuable starting point for my future research, giving me a foundation not only of information about the Bray School, but also its broad research potential across institutions and communities.  

After my work on the annotated bibliography, I shifted my focus to the Virginia Gazette Project. The goal of this project is to record mentions of enslavers of students at the Bray School within the pages of the Virginia Gazette in an effort to understand the environments that enslaved students were living in. Additionally, this research provides a database of information for future genealogical research about these enslaved individuals and their descendants.  

Working with information about Robert Carter Nicholas from the Virginia Gazette, I wrote an essay for the upcoming book, The Williamsburg Bray School: A History Through Records, Reflections, and Rediscovery. In this piece, I reflected on how Robert Carter Nicholas’s ideas for the Williamsburg Bray School were focused on his understanding of its function, finances, and higher-level management, rather than individual student educational progress. This perception of the Bray School underscores one of the purposes that its trustees and elites in the community understood it to be: a financial investment which would serve their interests as Anglicans and enslavers. 

Research about institutions can sometimes have a similar bent, where larger political or financial implications overshadow the experiences of individuals. However, the research I have completed here at the Bray School Lab has upended that understanding. While my research has not necessarily centered on studying a specific student, individuals are the ultimate center of my research contributions. With the annotated bibliography, the goal was to provide an accessible community resource, allowing anyone who is interested to learn more about the Williamsburg Bray School, its students, and its legacies. While the Virginia Gazette may be a project that begins with enslavers, that is not its end goal. Instead, these entries paint a picture of the context in which students and the school itself existed. Thus, they provide information about experiences that shaped the lives of each student, along with perceptions of each individual enslaver who shaped the school’s operation. Further, by expanding the research on each of these households, additional genealogical study can be completed based on the associations of different individuals, as reflected in these Gazette advertisements and letters. 

My time at the W&M Bray School Lab has given me valuable research experience, but also reinforced my belief that centering the study of history on community is vitally important. Beyond these larger political or financial understandings of the Bray School as an institution, there are the lived experiences of individual students and the perceptions of the school’s mission by those who funded it. Similarly, the Descendant, Williamsburg, and William & Mary Communities exist in conversation with the Lab’s work. Working alongside descendants with the book project and hearing about research they have completed at Family History Day have underscored the value of research completed by and for a community itself and the importance in investing in such a rich resource. Also, my experience recording letters for the Lab’s Voices Project provides greater accessibility to primary sources and gives them new life, allowing me and others to see them in a new way. Collaborating with other student thought partners and Bray Lab staff has been an invaluable experience.   

As I end my college education and begin a career in public history, my experience at the W&M Bray School Lab will carry me through future research and educational opportunities. While research for research’s sake can certainly be interesting, its value is exponentially increased once it is made not only available, but also accessible to the public. Further, it is vital that public programming is designed with the interests of the community in mind. The Bray School Lab has continued to highlight the value of such a community history, beginning with those surrounding and attending the school during its operation, and extending to the Williamsburg community today. 

Cecilia Weaver graduated in May 2024 with a double major in history and government. She is working as an Interpretation Park Ranger at Boston National Historical Park. 

By Rachel Hogue  

This past March, to round out Women’s History Month, the W&M Bray School Lab partnered to host a workshop on eighteenth-century sewing—and the incredible skills it required. The goal of the workshop was to go beyond the research about the marking and plain stitching likely done by female Williamsburg Bray School scholars. We put sewing tools in our own hands to better understand that facet of life and labor at the school. In his letter regarding school rules, Robert Carter Nicholas made sure to note the female scholars would learn “sewing, knitting, and other such things.” While we cannot say with certainty what the product of that labor was, the sewing itself becomes a valuable artifact.  

Recently, historian Serena Dyer has written on the value of recreating the processes of historical sewing work in studying eighteenth-century labor. By putting needles to fabric and recreating the processes through which the Bray school female students would have learned, we can “echo the movements of multiple hands which labored.” These echoes, sounded in the movement of needles and collaborative learning, do not retrace one specific pair of Bray student hands but instead point us to all the female students. Pulling from a single line in the primary textual sources the movements of the past become the artifacts we recreate as ‘surrogates’ for what the archive does not tell us about the Bray school students. We can and should still lament the context of enslavement surrounding such labor and yet simultaneously uphold the dignity and resilience of black women and girls who did this sewing, mending, washing, and “other such things.” As an act of both research and restorative justice we engaged with the materials, movements, and learning they had to experience.  

This workshop was an example of how creativity is necessary to bring research into accessible forms for our public, especially our Descendant Community. I presented my research on the sewing done by female scholars of the Williamsburg Bray School at the Slate Seminar in October 2023 and at Lemon Project Symposium in March 2023. In the wake of my presentation, I was quickly asked how this sewing history could become a hands-on teaching tool. It was necessary to realize that those presentations were only step one. First the research is presented to the public, and then with a workshop, it can literally be placed in the hands of our community. During our workshop on marking and plain stitches, the learning became a communal process. Conscientiously engaging the Lab’s invested community does not start and end with traditional presentation of research, it is a collaborative effort. Sewing history lends itself to a specific kind of hands-on work that benefits the need to close the gap between individual research and accessible, public forms of that research.  

Once the workshop got going, there was no need for one person to lecture, but rather all of us sat around the table and helped one another through the stitches. There was also a good deal of laughter over our collective difficulty with marking stitches and our more informed respect for the skill and dexterity of the Bray school scholars as children who had no choice but to do such labor. The learning was mutual; as I assisted with sewing, descendants engaged me with their history and entrusted me with their memories of the Bruton Heights School, in which we met for the workshop. 

We started with a short presentation about what we do know of black girls’ school sewing contemporary to the Williamsburg Bray School. This meant before anyone picked up a needle the entire workshop was on equal footing with background knowledge and context for the sewing projects tucked into the workbags given to each participant. We wove the needles in and out of fabric to get some semblance of the reversible cross-stitch methods, also known as a marking stitch. In the counting of each stitch’s pattern and arrangement we all quickly concluded how important arithmetic would have been to Bray School scholars engaging in such work. The Bray School scholars’ material literacy would have been just as complex as their reading and writing. Bringing the importance of literacy and access into the present, a crucial part of the workshop was introducing a digital component of this research.  Together with the Lab’s graduate assistant, Nicole Brown, I made a digitized map of primary sources, stitch instructions, and material culture. I invite readers to explore this map, think through the dexterity and skill required for a Bray School girl to maintain her safety as an enslaved child. And, more importantly, as you ponder the “echoes” of their moving hands, think of how these skills could have been masterfully subverted for resistance, liberation, and freedom despite the school’s goals to make girls—and boys—more “useful” to enslavers.  

Rachel Hogue graduated in May 2024 with a major in History. She is pursuing her master’s degree in Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York in England.