Where do we go from here?

The documents from this project have been lying in wait to tell us the stories of the people within them. Even just the process of staff preparing them for each step of the grant process has unlocked new chapters and entirely new stories to be told. Staff from each of the contributing organizations will continue to pull on these threads but having the documents online will unlock huge potential for researchers outside of these organizations when building their narratives. James’s corn lasted a season, but the insight of that one document into his precarious position in enslavement endures today. Solomon and Roeloff Eltinge called New Paltz their home but their papers tell a story about our state and our country in its infancy deciding how it was going to treat its citizens. These documents feature local names and places, but weave the threads of their stories together and the resulting piece shows a story of America.

Importantly, this project allows us to share these documents as resources with educators, so students can learn about state and national history, not as if it happened in some place far away from them, but as it happened just down the street from them.

The first grant pulled documents from the very foundation of New Paltz in the 1670s to the 1840s. This second grant would have gone all the way to 1900, taking us from revolution to civil war, enslavement to freedom. Who knows what uncovered stories await us?