Lexington Digital Humanities Project Fund (Digital Access Project)Fiscal Sponsorship Fund
The Digital Access Project of Kentucky (DAP) will make Fayette County's property history visible and accessible to all by making digital images and metadata transcription available online for the first time. More than 170,000 pages across 305 books (and forward) of Fayette County’s historical property records are digitally preserved and made available online for free to the public, scholars, professionals, and student researchers. These records help tell the stories of early European settlers, Kentucky Veterans, Irish and German Immigrants, Kentucky’s early Jewish community, women’s property and business records, enslaved and free African Americans, and much more.
Downtown Lexington was the site of one of the largest slave markets in the Southeastern United States. Thousands of transactions recorded in Fayette County contained names of large segments of the enslaved population prior to emancipation and the official end of slavery on December 6, 1865. In the late 1890s, newspapers across the country contained ‘information wanted’ ads placed by formerly enslaved people looking for family members who had been sold and separated from them in Lexington, KY. Publishing Fayette County’s historical property records online will help assist in answering these questions that still linger for many Black families today. Digitizing and bringing these documents online and into a searchable database platform will take human power, specialized equipment, historical expertise, and funding. Thanks to the Digital Access Project partnership, Fayette County will be the first county in Kentucky to digitize its historical property records dating back to the late 1700s.
On May 23, 2022, this project kicked off by digitizing the first General Index Book to Deeds and Mortgages, and will continue until each page from all books identified as deeds, wills, burnt records, county court orders, historic Fayette Surveys, Declaration of Marriage Book, Marriage Colored Bonds, City Minute Books and other city records, the 1896—1910 Fayette County School Census Books, Guardianships, and their indexes are digitized. Please continue to visit our website at https://fayettedeeds.com as we work to upload all the images.
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