As I walked into the “To Be Sold” exhibit at the Library of Virginia, a section of Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s now classic work “The Presence of the Past” describing public opinion on museum and family history moved to the forefront of my thoughts, and I spent much of the tour contemplating how the exhibit and this text related to each other. Interested in the popular uses of history in American life, Rosenzweig and Thelen asked 1,500 Americans to rank the perceived trustworthiness of various sources. The average response put “Personal accounts from grandparents or other relatives” second-highest on the list, just behind “Museums” and well ahead of “College history professors.” Considering the significance that many Americans attach to personal accounts and family histories, I often found myself weighing the exhibit’s significance to family history: How and in what ways does “To Be Sold” incorporate a sense of familial or personal history into the display?

In Rosenzweig and Thelen’s findings, the substantial trust in family history appeared to stem broadly from two considerations—one that contrasted long-established trust between two family members with the relative absence of trust between two strangers, and one that took the possibility of a storyteller with a personal agenda into account. While it’s certainly logical to conjecture that trust levels within a family are generally higher than between strangers, I was struck by just how high of a pedestal family accounts enjoyed when compared to other historical sources. A few of the respondents indicated not only an unconditional trust for family accounts, but also a marked distrust of resources like teachers and college professors, whose judgment they tended to view as biased or politicized.

The level of trust one has in a history source goes a long way in determining which accounts are accepted as truth, to be sure, but I think that widespread reverence for family accounts is also attributable to quests for personal identity. In addition to carrying a certain historical weight, a family member’s personal story also offers the potential for self-realization or fulfillment, especially in our contemporary, individualistic society. This significance of lineage, in conjunction with the trust ingrained in many American families, affects public students of history in a way that cannot easily be replicated by secondary or impersonal arbiters.

These thoughts on personal and familial micro-histories helped shape my interaction with the “To Be Sold” exhibit on the slave trade in Richmond before the Civil War. The trajectory of the exhibit began with relatively impersonal information on how the trade was structured and operated during the early-to-mid 1800s, with images of newspaper ads, catalogs, and other texts relating the business side of the process to the observer. As I moved through the production its contents became increasingly humanized, as paintings by British artist Eyre Crowe depicted slaves, often with their families, in an apprehensive light on days of sale. The final section of the exhibit centered around the chilling display of a neck collar, shackles, and a couple of autobiographical accounts by African-Americans who were caught in the slave trade in Richmond. One such story was of a free black woman who was unlawfully sold into slavery while visiting the south—though she managed to bring her case to the courts, she passed away before the trial could occur. This progression from fairly impersonal material to intensely personal micro-histories increased incrementally the emotional stakes, compelling the museum-goer to connect with the exhibit on a deeper, more human level by the conclusion of the tour.