welcome!

how it started
Nine years ago, when I first found the digital archive of Charlottesville’s Daily Progress newspaper on the website of the University of Virginia Library, I noticed that in the 1890s and 1900s many African American obituaries were published on the front page. I started saving “clippings” by taking screen shots of obituaries and other articles pertinent to African Americans in Charlottesville. I’m sharing the clippings here.

how it works
The menu on this website includes four sections: article clippings, obituary clippings, article notes, and obituary notes. You’ll find one set of articles and obituaries in the clippings collection and another set in the notes, with some occasional overlap. That’s because early on I saved hundreds of clippings, and later I switched to saving notes—making a citation for each article or obituary with a link to its page in the Daily Progress archive. I’ve included notes here for articles and obituaries from 1893 through 1964 but because of copyright concerns I’ve only included clippings published before 1928.

what’s next
I still visit the Daily Progress archive regularly and I’ll add to this collection occasionally. I’ve browsed the archive from March 1893 through December 1928, and I’m now browsing 1929.

a search function
It’s difficult to discover what information the Daily Progress online archive contains about a particular person or topic because its text isn’t searchable. In 2023 the Daily Progress 1954–2023 was added to the online archive at the Newspapers.com subscription service. For earlier issues, 1893–1953, you can search here to find names, places, or keywords in the citation texts or clipping titles included on my site.

please note
The early Daily Progress was a conservative white newspaper with a distinctly Jim Crow perspective, and many of the clippings collected here are derogatory in nature. Obituaries had offensive titles and often even the most glowing tributes expressed nostalgia for the antebellum days and the “old order.” However, in those same obituaries priceless information about people can often be found—facts not available anywhere else now—death dates, church affiliations, relatives, employers, occupations.

the obituary collection
More than 800 African American obituaries from the Daily Progress are collected here, 300 of them published before 1912, the year statewide death certificates were first required in Virginia. Obituaries published before that year can be especially valuable to family historians.