First Hand Accounts and Letters
Who We Are
Previous Staff
Christie Padgett is in her third year at Virginia Tech, majoring in Art History and Classical studies. Since joining the Virtual Jamestown project in the fall of 2002, she has assisted Matthew Parrott by contributing time and ideas to aid in the creation of a virtual fort model and by helping with the final details of the finished animation. After graduating in 2004, she plans to attend graduate school and continue her studies in art history.
Tom Snediker is a second year graduate student in the history department at Virginia Tech and contributed the biography of Virginia's first president Edward-Maria Wingfield. Tom has an extensive and diverse background that includes colonial American history, Latin American history (also a contributor to the Mexican War and the Media project URL: http://www.majbill.vt.edu/history/MxAmWar/index.htm), as well as Appalachian history which is the subject of his M.A. thesis. Tom is actively pursuing strategies for putting history in a digital environment through his M.A. thesis on the Battle of Blair Mountain - 1921.
Kevin Butterfield worked with the Virtual Jamestown site while an editor at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in 1998. He is now an acquisitions and manuscript editor at Northern Illinois University Press. His chief contributions to the site were compilations of laws and court records of seventeenth-century Virginia.
Emily Gibb is a fourth-year government major from the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Emily has always had a strong interest in Virginia history. She worked on the early design stages of the Virtual Jamestown site. Emily is looking towards a career in broadcast journalism.
Wayne Graham worked on the Christ's Hospital database during the summer of 2000. He received his B.A. from the Virginia Military Institute and is currently finishing his M.A. in Early American history at the College of William and Mary. He is a research assistant at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and he is helping to develop Colonial Williamsburg's digital library.
A professional writer and editor for seven years before pursuing her doctorate in history, Louisa Parker Mattozzi worked on the Papers of James Madison for a year and a half prior to joining the Virtual Jamestown staff in the 1999-2000 academic year as the editorial manager for first-hand accounts. Louisa, a graduate of Agnes Scott College, Atlanta, Georgia, is currently a Ph.D. candidate in early modern Europe at the University of Virginia, specializing in the sixteenth century.
Jenry Morsman, a doctoral candidate in American history at the University of Virginia, served as the Charlottesville site manager for Virtual Jamestown during the 1999-2000 academic year. He also worked with research assistants on databases, first-hand accounts, and maps.
Amy Murrell is a doctoral candidate in American history at the University of Virginia. She focuses on the South in the nineteenth century. Amy has worked on digital history projects at the Virginia Center for Digital History for five years and served as the Associate Director of the Virginia Center for Digital History in the 1999-2000 academic year. She provided technical and administrative support to the Virtual Jamestown team. Amy also oversaw the transcription and mark-up of first-hand accounts.
Sarah Parnes, a third-year student at the University of Virginia, assisted with data entry for Virtual Jamestown during the 1999-2000 academic year.
Marjorie Webb, a fourth-year English major from Connecticut, was a research assistant for Virtual Jamestown during the 1999-2000 academic year. She concentrated on selecting seventeenth-century letters for the site. Marjorie plans to live in London after she graduates in May 2001.
Craig Bellamy is a Ph.D. candidate at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Melbourne, Australia. He has a masters degree in history and new media and is currently engaged in a web-based project that seeks to explore the post-industrialization of an inner-city community in Australia. Craig will redesign the navigation for Virtual Jamestown during his internship at the Virginia Center for Digital History.
Georgianna Lee Dandy worked as a research assistant for Virtual Jamestown from May through December 1998 and she returned to the project in the Fall of 2000. She is the Assistant Project Manager for Colonial Williamsburg's Digital Library project where she oversees the SGML encoding of materials. She has a B.A. from Rutgers University and an M.A. from the College of William and Mary. This fall Georgianna Lee will transcribe first-hand accounts.
Timothy P. (Paul) Grady has been working on the Virtual Jamestown project since 1998. He received his B.A. from Tennessee Tech University and his M.A. from Virginia Tech. Paul is currently a Ph.D. student in early colonial history at the College of William and Mary with research interests in Trans-Atlantic history centered in seventeenth-century Virginia. He has transcribed first-hand accounts, entered information about indentured servants into databases, and compiled the timeline.
Ginger S. Hawkins is a graduate student in the history department at the College of William and Mary. Her research focus is upon seventeenth-century eastern North America, and her interests include Indian-European contact in New France and the development of slavery in early Virginia. She is currently completing a master's thesis entitled "Mothering to Worlds Old and New: Marie de l'Incarnation and Her 'Children'". Ginger is a graduate of the University of Dallas. She will compile information about indentured servants and slaves from the York County Court records and transcribe first-hand accounts this fall.
John Mooney is a second-year graduate student in history at the University of Virginia. Originally from North Carolina and Georgia, he went to college at Middlebury in Vermont before moving to Charlottesville. When he is not wrangling with vast amounts of information on colonial Jamestown, he works on the nineteenth-century South. John has done a good bit of work on the indentured servant databases for Virtual Jamestown and he expects to do more this academic year.
Andrew Morris is a doctoral candidate in the Corcoran Department of History, specializing in the history of contemporary United States social policy. He has worked for several years on the Virginia Center for Digital History's Valley of the Shadow project before joining the Virtual Jamestown project. Since joining Virtual Jamestown in the summer of 2000, he has worked on transcribing runaway servant ads, as well as transcribing, proofing, and marking up documents in the first-hand accounts section.
Sarah Taylor is a first year graduate student in the history department at Virginia Tech with a concentration in Colonial American history. She is especially interested in slave resistance and has found the runaway slave advertisements on the website to be very useful. Sarah is currently transcribing the Records of the Virginia Company of London. She hopes to become a museum curator.