Tyrone Turner / DCist/WAMU
Dr. Lopez Matthews, Jr. traces his finger along a yellowing page in an oversized book. He reads a header written in ornate script, standing above columns containing names and dates.
“Register of Slave Commitments to the D.C. Jail,” he reads. “So these are slave runaways from 1848 to 1862. So when enslaved people ran away and they were caught, they were taken to the D.C. Jail, and this is the register.”
Matthews likens the book to an official lost and found; in this case, though, the “property” was people.
The book is a small sampling of the thousands of historical documents, artifacts, and materials that are housed inside the archives, the city’s formal repository for government records. There are property records signed by Frederick Douglass, a longtime recorder of deeds for the city; a will for Alexander Graham Bell; Duke Ellington’s birth certificate; and tens of thousands of square feet worth of other official documents that tell the story of the city’s people.
“The archives are basically the memory of the District: birth certificates, death certificates, marriage records. Those are all records that relate to the residents of D.C.,” says Matthews, who was hired last year to serve as the city’s first official state archivist. “This is your history in connection with the government.”
The D.C. Archives is located in Naylor Court, an alley off of Ninth Street NW close to the Washington Convention Center.
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