09/18/2026
The 339 Manumissions and Beyond Project: Our 1st Biannual Retreat
Sept. 10th-12th, 2026
We laughed. We cried. We learned. And, for several unforgettable days, we walked directly into the history we have been working so hard to uncover.
This month, the 339 Manumissions and Beyond Project held its first biannual retreat in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Members traveled from several states across the country to come together, board members committed to uncovering the lives and stories of Black people who were enslaved by Quakers in the 1700s.
We had several days filled with fellowship, discovery, reflection, and moments that reminded us why this work matters.
Beginning With Fellowship
We began our retreat with a relaxed meet and greet! A chance to step away from the zooms, computers and research to simply get to know one another.
There was laughter, conversation, good food, and a private acoustic guitar concert performed by one of our members. We talked about our families, our experiences and how we met the founder Avis Wanda McClinton.
As many of you know, we are fortunate to have incredible genealogists and researchers who spend countless hours digging through archives, libraries, news articles, wills, deeds, and other historical documents. They are searching for names, families, relationships, places, Quaker enslaver affiliations, and evidence of what happened after “freedom.”
But during this retreat, our members had an opportunity to experience that work for themselves.
Becoming the Researcher
One of the most fascinating parts of the retreat was giving members the opportunity to take on the challenge of becoming a Researcher.
We traveled to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Center City Philadelphia, where we searched through historical materials and old volumes, looking for names connected to our 339.
There is something really special about holding an old book in your hands and realizing that the words you are reading were written hundreds of years ago and that we were touching history at that moment not simply reading about it.
We searched for the names of people who had been manumitted and whose lives were documented in fragments across our history. Each name continues to raise the questions.
Who were they? Where did they go after freedom? What work did they do? Did the Quaker assist them? And perhaps most importantly: What did freedom actually mean for them?
Harriet Tubman’s Name in Ink
Then came one of the most emotional moments of the retreat.
While examining the records, we were handed one of three journals from an African American abolitionist, William Still. In this journal we encountered the name of Harriet Tubman written, in ink, in Still’s documentation of the Underground Railroad.
There it was. Her name. A real person. A real date. A real entry in a historical record!
For those of us standing there, the experience was difficult to put into words. Harriet Tubman is someone many of us learned about in school. We know the name. We know the stories. We know the heroic role she played in helping enslaved people escape. But seeing her name written in an old document changes the experience. Suddenly, history becomes personal. And Harriet Tubman was not alone in those pages. William Still documented the journeys of numerous freedom seekers, people desperately searching for freedom and using aliases and carefully guarded information to avoid slave catchers. His records preserved details of their movements and experiences, creating an incredible yet historical record of the Underground Railroad.
Standing there, several of us became emotional. It was sobering and fascinating! And it was almost unbelievable to realize that so much rich Black American history had survived in the archives around us.
From the Archives to the Stenton House Museum
Our journey continued into the Logan neighborhood, where we visited Stenton House, the historic home, now a museum, of James Logan. Logan was the Colonial Secretary for William Penn. There, we learned more about Dinah, an enslaved woman whose story has become an important part of our understanding the lives of enslaved people connected to Philadelphia’s Quaker history.
According to the Stenton tradition, Dinah played a critical role in saving the house from a fire. During the Revolutionary war, “irregular” British forces attempted to burn down the home of Logan but Dinah managed to steer them away, thus, saving the home from destruction. She was eventually given her freedom, but remained connected to the Logan household as a paid servant. Finally passing away in 1805, Dinah is buried on the Stenton House grounds. However standing at Stenton brought another dimension to our research. We weren’t simply reading about an enslaved person named Dinah. We were standing where she lived and worked. We sat together at Dinah’s memorial and tried to imagine the world from her perspective.
What did she see? What did she fear? Why did she remain?
And really, what choices were actually available to an enslaved woman in eighteenth century Philadelphia?
We ended our day by visiting another historic site connected to Philadelphia’s African American and Underground Railroad history, the Johnson House Historic Site, in Germantown.
Again, the history became a reality. We walked through rooms and spaces where people lived, worked, cooked, slept, gathered, and made decisions that shaped the lives of abolitionists and the enslaved seeking freedom.
Throughout the retreat, something remarkable happened.
The +339 manumitted people we have been researching stopped feeling like names on a page and began to feel like people. As we turned the pages of archived records and searched for their names and whereabouts, we began to understand how difficult it can be to reconstruct a life from fragments.
A name may appear in one document.
A family connection may appear somewhere else.
A township may provide another clue.
And slowly and sort of painfully, the person begins to emerge.
Why the 339 Manumissions and Beyond Project Matters
This retreat reminded us that the 339 Manumissions and Beyond Project is about much more than documenting who was freed. It is about what happened next. What happened to the families? Where did the newly freed go? Our research is an effort to follow those lives beyond the manumission, as we know their lives did continue.
Our first retreat gave us something that research alone cannot provide. It gave us a shared experience,laughing, learning and searching together. Most importantly, we were reminded that behind every archived record is a human being who lived, loved, resisted, and hoped for better.
The retreat strengthened our commitment to uncovering those stories and bringing them forward, making sure these lives are not forgotten.
Thanks for reading!
Harriet Tubman’s names signed on top of this page!!! This Page of all those traveling on the “UNDERGROUND RAILROAD”🙌🏽🙌🏽 # abolitionist
