Papers of the Benjamin Franklin Yancey Family

The Benjamin F. Yancey collection includes a wide range of letters, a diary, photographs, and other materials from the personal papers of the Yancey family from approximately 1895 to the early 1950s. The collection was discovered in the Yancey home in 1999 and turned over to the Virginia Center for Digital History and to the Albert B. Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, which maintains a complete list of the collection's contents.

Benjamin F. Yancey served as the principal of a black elementary school in rural Esmont in Albemarle County. His wife, Harriet, also taught at the Esmont Colored School, and the Yancey's children were educated there.

At this website you can find the letters from the Yancey Collection. The bulk of the letters were written in the 1920s and 30s from the children to Harriet Yancey and cover a wide range of concerns of the day. Taken as a whole the Yancey papers represent one of the largest collections of letters of an African American family in the segregation era.

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Understanding the Online Presentation of the Yancey Letters
Yancey Collection Home
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