Black Lives Next Door in Fairfax

By: Imran Ahmad

This exhibit is to talk about the life of land owners in Virginia which is done through the life of John Augustus Brown, a farmer who resided in Gum Spring from the 1800s and early 1900s, as a part of the Black Lives Next Door (BLND) Initiative. Finding John’s life not only revealed info about who he was but also the lives of those around him such as his family and his wife. Evidence about Brown’s life was gathered from sources in the Fairfax County Historical Records Center and the Virginia Room of the Public Library. In total, a plethora of tax documents and deeds via land records gathered key points like land ownership, the dates of when the events occurred, and the people involved in these acts. Attributes about the people themselves were found in Census records in Ancestry, which gathered the likes of birth/death dates, race, marriage dates, family trees, and more. This exhibit also evaluates how people of the past lived compared to the modern day in terms of what they did, the kinds of places they lived in, and if modern thoughts about the 19th century are fully true or if there is more to the past than meets the eye.