The Collaboratory formed as a learning community in 2017. The Collaboratory’s mission is to bring together faculty, staff, students, organizations, and community partners in Richmond, Virginia, to document and support African American history and culture via the region’s cemeteries. We aim to produce place-based knowledge that contributes to a community dialogue about caring for our collective past. Our work seeks to restore the commemorative functions of historic African American cemeteries and to recognize the stories of the people buried therein. We hope our work can inspire future collaborations toward these ends.

This page provides links to various sites, books, articles, etc. relating to the history of the city of Richmond and the lives of African Americans in it.

This page provides links to maps and 3D imaging produced to document African American Cemeteries in and around Richmond, Virginia. Mapping protocols have evolved over time to the current protocol which has been deployed at sites outside Richmond.

The archive serves as a knowledge hub for descendants, students, scholars, and members of the public who are conducting genealogical and historical research, as well as people with more general interests—late 19th- and 20th-century Richmond and Virginia history, African American narratives, Jim Crow, and other topics.

Created by the Cemetery Collaboratory, the archive brings together a wide range of primary sources—portraits, death certificates, marriage records, draft registration cards, obituaries, newspaper articles, and more—and data drawn from the cemeteries themselves, such as GPS coordinates, gravestone photographs, and written descriptions of markers and plots. Records are linked to the Collaboratory’s various maps of cemeteries and memorial records on Find A Grave. Users can search or browse records for all the cemeteries so far included or select a specific cemetery to search.