A Conversation with the Bray School Lab
Opening its doors 264 years ago, the Williamsburg Bray School is the oldest surviving school for free and enslaved Black children. On Feb. 10, 2023, members of the College of William & Mary and the Williamsburg communities bore witness to the relocation of the Williamsburg Bray School.
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The move of the Bray School in 2023 came after Terry L. Meyers, a now-retired English professor at the College, unearthed the Bray School’s original purpose through years of research.
Yet, Meyers is not the only academic doing research on the Bray School. The William & Mary Bray School Lab — a component of the Office of Strategic Cultural Partnerships and the Williamsburg Bray School Initiative, a partnership between the College and The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation — has engaged in efforts to learn more about the historic site. Situated in the Barrett House in Colonial Williamsburg, the Bray School Lab recruits undergraduate and graduate students as well as professional historians.
“The overarching [purpose] of the William & Mary Bray School Lab is to study, preserve and share broadly the history and the legacy of the Williamsburg Bray School,” said Maureen Elgersman Lee, Director of the William & Mary Bray School Lab. “We estimated some 300 to 400 children would have been educated during those 14 years.”
Elgersman Lee expanded on the student demographics of the Bray School.
“They were all African-American children, roughly aged three to 10, based on one surviving document that actually gives us ages, as we look for more and hopefully we'll find more,” she added.
Elgersman Lee said the lab benefits from working with students at the College who engage in varied research, from examining old newspapers to recording oral histories.
“Some graduate students, but primarily undergraduate students [work at the lab]. There's no barrier as far as discipline. We have students across arts and sciences, education. We have some business students,” Elgersman Lee said. “And then also within that, students who come either as individuals who are interested or part of cohorts from particular classes. This semester, for example, we’re enjoying a number of Sharpe scholars...and students stay as long as they want or are able to.”
Elgersman Lee delved into the specifics of student projects at the lab.
“When the labs started in October of 2021, we had two major projects: the Records Project and the Student History Project,” Elgersman Lee said. “So the records project was diving into all known documents and really mining those documents to help us understand as much as we could about the Williamsburg Bray School — its operation, its funding, the Bray associates. The students, of course, were the center of the history of the school. Again, the students were...a small number of free children, but the vast majority of the students we know based on surviving documents were enslaved.”
The Associates of Dr. Bray, an organization with close ties to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, supported the establishment of the Williamsburg Bray School. This was done at the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin and with support from the College’s president and Rector of Bruton Parish Church, Rev. Thomas Dawson, according to Elgersman Lee and the Bray School Initiative’s website.
“Their mission was to create and fund schools for — using their term, Negro — for African American and also indigenous students in their American colonies,” Elgersman Lee said. “So they’re in London. They’re sending money. They’re sending...hundreds of books to different places where they want to set up a school. And we call them Bray Schools; they were called Negro schools or charity schools [then]. The scholarship has developed the tradition of calling them Bray Schools because they were funded by the Bray Associates.”
Elgersman Lee states that although the Bray Associates supported education, they were not abolitionists.
“They were not abolitionists. Certainly not during the time of the Williamsburg Bray School, not pre-revolution. There are some indications of a transformation of sorts after the revolution. But clearly that's not aligned with the Bray School,” Elgersman Lee explained. “The Bray Associates in their documents, if you mine their internal correspondences and records of their meetings, there's a phrase that they used, referring to enslaved persons: ‘They are slaves, yet people.’ So they were not trying to undermine slavery, but they were trying to do what others outside the church, outside the England church would do — ‘Enslave the body, save the soul.’”
The Student History project was created with the aim of understanding the experiences of the “scholars,” as they were called.
“Where do they go after the school? What happened in terms of family formation, to the degree that society at that time was allowing family formation, but subsequently understanding the generations that, passed through time, if you would, to get us to today. And we recognized — and we knew very early on that we would need a genealogist and also an oral historian,” Elgersman Lee said.
One instance where the Bray School Lab has made a discovery is on the changing definition of the term “scholar.” While the word was first viewed positively, further research shed more light on the term’s meaning.
“They are scholars because they are the beneficiaries of scholarships, and they are the beneficiaries of the monies,” Elgersman Lee said. “Therefore, there is a deep investment in finding out that and hopefully confirmation that all this effort is paying off in some way. That's a different term. That's a different meaning for that word than what we are looking at. And it reduces these letters to much more of reports and transactions than about a kind of altruistic curiosity about the improvement of Black children.”
As Director of the Bray School Lab, Elgersman Lee has experience interacting with the local African-American community. After joining the College in Feb. 2021 as the Mellon Engagement Coordinator for African American Heritage to support the College’s “Sharing Authority to Remember and Re-interpret the Past” grant, Elgersman Lee later joined the Williamsburg Bray School Initiative alongside then-Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs, Ann Marie Stock.
“I've been amazed to be part of this project ever since. Every day, there’s a sense of amazement around what this opportunity represents, in terms of your own professional life, but more importantly, the opportunity to really have an impact and do the research that leads to a broader telling of America’s history, particularly during the founding era,” Elgersman Lee said.
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Apart from Elgersman Lee, the Bray School Lab has three other professional staff members: Genealogist Elizabeth Drembus, Oral Historian Tonia Merideth, and Graduate Assistant Nicole Brown.
“I was working in DC, and I had been doing genealogy with some local history projects for a number of years, and then I was a genealogist for the Daughters of the American Revolution for almost ten years,” Drembus said. “In addition to that, I was doing descendant research for the Virginia Theological Seminary's Reparations Research Project. So the opportunity to work with the William & Mary Bray School lab — doing genealogy with records from the time of the revolution and even predating that, as well as doing descendant research — just kind of fit very, very nicely [with] everything that I was working towards. So I echo what [Elgersman Lee] said, it’s an amazing privilege to be a part of this work and this project, and to bring, really, the lived experiences of the students to life as much as we can through the documents that we’re finding.”
As a genealogist, Drembus looks at documents, books, and records to find links between individuals and the Williamsburg Bray School. In that capacity, she not only examines historical papers but also works with the descendant community.
“Anytime I find a name in a record, it’s a big moment for me,” Drembus said. “But I think one of the things that I’ve been looking at, most recently, is Aggie in the Peyton Randolph household, and Isaac B. in the John Blair household. And as we start to look at the intersection and the overlap between the families of Williamsburg and how they’re in business with each other, how they are intermarrying with each other, we see what that means for the scholars who went to the Williamsburg Bray School.”
Drembus also cited an example of the connection between Aggie and Isaac B., who both attended the Williamsburg Bray School.
“I’m looking at Aggie and I’m looking at Isaac B., and Aggie’s daughter Kitty ends up in the same household as Isaac B. does in Mecklenburg County. So the story is stretching out beyond Williamsburg and even out beyond York County, James City County, and the immediate surrounding counties. And yet through marriages and through descendants of white families, you also see the continuation of this connection between the scholars who experienced — or at least the descendants of the scholars who attended — the Williamsburg Bray School,” Drembus said.
Based on the rubric for determining membership of descendant communities, Elgersman Lee said, there are many ways an individual could be considered a member of one. The first clear category is descendants of the Bray School scholars.
“So you have those who are descendants...of some of the children who went to the Bray School,” Elgersman Lee said. “We have descendants of those individuals who were in Williamsburg at the time of the school, even if a clear connection to attending the Bray School is not there, or not there yet.”
Elgersman Lee then expanded on the other two categories.
“And then there’s another group that can be invited [to be] descendant community members, and that is those who have no known genealogical connection to the students or to the community at the time, but those who feel a connection,” Elgersman Lee said. “Some might think of them as allies who have a connection, and are particularly supportive of the descendant community and the efforts around what we’re doing here with the William & Mary Bray School Lab.”
After reaching out to the descendant community, Elgersman Lee said the Bray School Lab has hosted multiple outreach and engagement events, and asked for feedback from the members. These events have included reaching out to churches, hosting events with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the Lab, and other regular activities.
“For instance, we have some descendant community members who are interested in just getting some help with their own genealogy,” Drembus said. “So they’d come into the lab, and I’d sit with them, and we’d go through, you know, Ancestry or FamilySearch and help them plug in some holes that maybe they had as well as keeping in mind that they may have direct connections to Bray School scholars.”
Drembus also touched on the nuances of the definition of descendant community members.
“As long as I'm keeping their family names in mind and their timelines and those kinds of things, I can also see whether they connect either directly or [indirectly]. Because of the institution of slavery separating so many families, families had to be kind of regrouped, depending on where you were living in and what household you were living in,” Drembus said. “So, that definition of family is broader, and so the definition of descendant is broader.”
Another member of the staff who regularly engages with the descendant community is Oral Historian Tonia Merideth.
“My main role at the Bray School Lab is to interview the descendant community of the Williamsburg Bray School,” Merideth said. “My day-to-day activities include interviewing narrators, editing the video interviews, generating transcripts of the interviews for narrator approval, and processing the interviews for final archiving and accessibility with Special Collections.”
As the Williamsburg Bray School is slated to open to the public in fall of this year, Elgersman Lee explains what success looks like after the launch. She also states it is important to note that the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation — the Bray School Lab’s collaborator under the Bray School Initiative — owns the building and is driving restoration and preservation efforts.
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“They’re going to bring the building back to its 18th century composition. So when that’s done, we’ll all be standing looking at that building. I’m sure [we’ll be] amazed and just in awe of the exceptional skills that they brought to bear on the building,” Elgersman Lee said. “But Fall 2024, in some ways, is the beginning, right? Particularly from a public perspective. ‘Oh, the building’s open, I can see inside the building.’ For us, in many ways it’s a really, really important milestone. In many ways, it’s really just the beginning, because our work is open-ended. There’s so much work. So success is the building, certainly drawing attention to the history of the school and the children and inviting people to be curious about this moment in history.”
The Bray School Lab is always looking for student engagement. One demographic that Elgersman Lee wants to see more from, in particular, are student athletes, as they stay on campus longer than the traditional student. But she also said the lab welcomes students from all backgrounds and majors.
“Check us out. People can email us if they have questions, if there are opportunities outside of classes, if there’s an opportunity to align the work...if there’s something that you’re doing that you’re interested in for a class that could align with some aspect of the Williamsburg Bray School history, we’re happy to help support that,” Elgersman Lee said. “But there’s a place for any student who’s interested. There is a place to partner with and be part of what we’re doing. And it doesn’t all have to be here in the lab — we have students who are doing hybrid work and others who are doing more independent, project-based work. But it's here and we're doing just a variety of different things. This is the Year of the Arts and also, Historical Imagining and Imagining Bray is something that we’d love to see more students engage with.”
Elgersman Lee emphasized that a constant challenge at the Bray School Lab, in addition to the lack of documents, are the time constraints that the lab has in conducting its activities. As such, she encourages students to participate in the project, which she says is a great way for students to get involved and garner experience.
“We welcome all William and Mary students, undergraduate, graduate, full-time, part-time, traditional student, non-traditional, whatever, if you are here,” Elgersman Lee said. “If you go here, you belong here. If you go here, there's a space for you at the lab as well.”