00:00The work you do is so fascinating and so important.
00:08Hi, I'm so happy to be here today.
00:10My name is Christy Warren and I'm an historian.
00:13Marva is a junior research assistant
00:16and she's the person that gets both Marva and Abby into the house
00:21and she secures the gig of being the authenticators.
00:25Could you share a little bit about your experience
00:28starting out as a junior researcher?
00:31Yeah, so my first job as a researcher
00:34was at University College London
00:36on the second part of the Legacies of British Slave Ownership Project.
00:41So the first island I looked at was St. Kitts,
00:43which is why we have these papers out.
00:45And we also have a journal from a plantation in Nevis.
00:49This is a very specific entryway into thinking about enslaved people.
00:53This is not their experiences, their desires, their hopes.
00:57It is their work and the decisions that were made for them and about them.
01:02Doing this kind of work can be quite overwhelming.
01:06How could I come at this in an empowering way?
01:08So the idea that I am the descendant of people who were listed as numbers,
01:12who were listed without surnames,
01:14but I get to be part of the conversation.
01:16I get to say, look, look at him again, look at his name, think about him.
01:21And when you receive these papers,
01:23do you assume that they are authentic until something proves otherwise?
01:29What we would consider is who has the papers?
01:32And in this case, the family had the papers over hundreds of years.
01:36They were then passed to an archives in Kent who would have assessed them
01:40before coming into this archive.
01:42When someone brings in or phones up and says,
01:46we have, we found something that might be of interest to you.
01:51What happens?
01:52How, what's the process being?
01:54Okay, so first off, that's super rare nowadays.
01:56Of course.
01:57It does happen, but it's very, very rare.
01:59One of the things that is most important is establishing provenance.
02:03So it's understanding the context of the documents,
02:07the history of the documents.
02:08Now, someone like Marva clearly is interested in the contents.
02:11So if I was Marva, I would think I would have these documents.
02:15I'd be looking through them, looking for something in particular.
02:18We know basically all these pages are the same, right?
02:21Very often.
02:22So if it's kind of repetitious, you get an idea of the rhythm of the book.
02:26And then what you're often doing is looking for things that are different.
02:30We'd be interested in knowing about the family's genealogy,
02:32the history of the house,
02:34and anything that we can learn about the family's business.
02:38We'd need to think about the condition of the papers.
02:42Can we actually open the journal?
02:44So here we've got some parchment, which is made out of animal skin.
02:48And if the cover was made out of calf skin,
02:51we'd be thinking about similar things.
02:52What has grown on top of that cover in that time?
02:56What do we need to consider?
02:57We need you to put in the hours looking at this stuff, distilling it, reinterpreting it,
03:05explaining it for us in a drama world in which you then can create a story
03:13and present it to another audience who, for whatever reason, aren't equipped to look here.
03:21I think it's amazing work.
03:25And I feel the same way about this relationship
03:28because I think the arts are so important
03:30for helping people to consider this type of information.
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