Visualizations help illustrate stories within large quantities of data. The following visualizations are made using a set of 338 manumissions from the Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting Manumission collection.
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Below is a timeline visualization displaying all the dates when manumissions were signed. Remember, the date of signing does not always correspond with the freed date. Often, a manumission was signed with the promise that it would go into effect years later or at an age of maturity, like 18 or 21. To interact with the timeline, place your cursor on the timeline, click and hold to drag the timeline forward or backwards. Use the buttons in the top right corner of the timeline to zoom or enter full screen mode.
Below is pie chart that visualizes the percentage of manumissions from each location in our records. Click on a place name on the legend to the right of the pie chart to remove a place from the pie chart. One choice in creating this visualization was determining what place names to combine. For example, a place like Northern Liberties, in 2021, is commonly subsumed in Philadelphia. Despite this, we decided to keep Philadelphia and Northern Liberties as separate places in our data to reflect the historical geographies of the past.
Below is a visualization that seeks to explore how the freed age of an individual was affected by that individual's gender. Historically, the age of maturity differed between women and men. Women were typically seen as mature by age 18, while men were seen as mature by age 21. This is reflected in our visualization where you can see that for the age of 18, 43 women were freed and 1 man. At the age of 21, 5 women were freed and 73 men. You can see these numbers by hovering your cursor over the different bars on the graph.