Student sleuths track down slave tag histories

It was a long shot, but Betsy Neurauter's team of amateur sleuths couldn't resist the mystery -- and the chance to do something great.

Their daunting goal: to authenticate a pair of slave tags and return them to their prior owners' descendants.

"It was quite a journey," said Neurauter, a Glenbard South High School English teacher. "History was brought to life. The results were amazing."

The group of Glen Crest sixth-graders and Glenbard South freshmen and seniors together logged roughly 300 hours over the summer, researching on the Internet, making numerous phone calls and trekking to Rockford to unearth clues about the discolored copper pieces.

"The research was really fun. It was kinda like connect the dots because you have to get one dot and you have to get another dot, but if you don't get the right one you don't get the right picture," said sixth-grade researcher Benjamin Bui. "I learned a lot."

Their efforts, titled "The Slave Tag Project," a 40-minute video, premiered Sept. 28 in the auditorium at Glenbard South High School.

"It was an adventure. We learned a lot about slavery. Sometimes you find unexpected things," said Neurauter, who received a Partnership for Educational Progress Grant for the project. "I'd recommend it … to anyone who enjoys a mystery."

The contemporary story begins during the summer of 2006 in an antique mall in Des Moines, Iowa, where Neurauter was treasure hunting with a friend. She happened upon a dark metallic object with markings of an 1800s slave tag. It was dark and had signs of deterioration.

It didn't feel right that it should be sitting on a shelf in a shop being hawked for profit, she said. So she bought it with the intent of finding its rightful owner.

Later that summer, she found a second slave tag, a different shape with different markings, in an antique mall in downstate Princeton. She bought that one, too, and set on a mission.

Realizing it was too daunting a task for one person, she recruited some students and funding through a grant from the Partnership for Educational Progress Foundation.

Researchers included Glen Crest sixth-graders Benjamin Bui, Clara Neurauter and Jamie Francis; Glenbard South freshmen Ellen Egerton, Kathryn Volk and Olivia Heath; and Glenbard South seniors Monica Guio, Kiara Rogers, Melissa Johnson and Durga Thakral.

Glenbard South senior Grant Deliberto served as videographer and film editor on the project.

The investigators hit their first snag almost immediately during their online searches. Some apparently credible Web sites said authentic tags were extremely rare, and their shapes and sizes different from school group's treasures.

Slave tags were made from 1800 to 1864, but only in Charleston, S.C., and one of its suburbs, Charleston Neck.

Slaves wore them to show they could work outside their master's residence and that they'd paid their wage taxes to the government, said expert Rich Hartzog of Rockford, who operates www.exonumia.com.

They are "quite rare," but one collector recently unearthed a stash in piles of Charleston dirt he'd purchased, Hartzog said.

"It's the only relic of slavery that can absolutely be guaranteed to have been worn by slaves," Hartzog said.

The determined young sleuths would not be deterred -- not yet. Not until proof was conclusive one way or the other.

"A lot of the information didn't apply to our tags … (and) there are always exceptions," freshman researcher Kathryn Volk said. "We were hoping to trace it back and give it to a museum or something."

Neurauter remained hopeful because she previously had found a statue in an antiques mall in Savanna, Ill., for $24 that turned out to be a 900-year-old piece of the mountainous tribe in Mexico.

So the group pressed on with their task.

They continued with research online and with phone interviews of experts and museum curators throughout Illinois and southeastern United States.

They learned more about slavery and authentic slave tags, how some slaves literally earned their freedom by working these outside jobs.

They learned that while the tags were unique to the Charleston area, the concept of allowing slaves to work and earn their own money was not. And much of the records have been lost or destroyed over the years.

They also learned about "fantasy" tags, replicas that are sometimes advertised as duplicates and sometimes purported to be real, Hartzog said.

Some are collected knowingly by people who cannot afford genuine tags, which run for $2,000 to more than $10,000 each, he said. Some are purchased by people who believe they are buying the genuine article, he said.

It was Hartzog who gave the student sleuths the disappointing news that their tags were replicas.

"It was kind of sad … they were (exploiting) a part of our history," Volk said.

Despite the unexpected and disappointing discovery, the students consider the project invaluable -- beyond just "buyer beware."

They learned much about 19th century and contemporary history. They got practice doing research, working as a team, problem-solving and verifying their sources.

"The concept of slavery in our history is interesting because we overcame it eventually. It's interesting to see how our culture develops," said researcher Monica Guio.

"Finding anything out about them at all was fun. It's a whole mystery that is fun to find out … like 'Cold Case Files.' It's fun to see the process we went through."