A Material History of the Cartwright-Duckett Families: Commodities, Memories, and Freedom, explores the lives of the Cartwright’s and Ducketts, two Black families who illuminate the landscape of slavery, freedom, and community in nineteenth century Georgetown.

• Working with manumission records, wills, census records, church archives, and newspaper clippings, we have traced the emergence of freedom across these families, beginning with Reverend Joseph Cartwright Sr. who purchased the freedom of himself and much of his family. 

• We explore Rev. Joseph Cartwright’s work as a reverend for the Black congregation at the Dumbarton Ave United Methodist Church, his work as a travelling preacher, and his possible connections to the Underground Railroad. 

• We track Grace Ann “Gracie” Duckett, who survived both plantation and domestic slavery before obtaining her freedom and her and her children’s unique positions in domestic servitude.

• By tracking the material traces of these families, from indenture agreements and death records to their gravestones at the Mount Zion - Female Band Union Cemetery, we explore how these objects reveal the broader systems of commodification, racialized labor, and resistance. 

• We draw on key anthropological literature of Karl Marx, Sidney Mintz, and D.W. Winnicott to analyze how these objects operate as instruments that obscure labor realities, commodities shaped by exploitative economies, and transitional objects that connect present researchers to past lives. 

• We ultimately illuminate how the Cartwright and Duckett families navigated and reshaped the structures that sought to confine them, leaving behind a historical record that speaks to both the violence of enslavement and the enduring pursuit of freedom.