It took Hall 15 years to gather the more than 100,000 records of Africans and African-descended people in Louisiana from 1719 to 1820 and make them accessible on a searchable CD-ROM. Hall is professor emerita of history at Rutgers University and the author of the prize-winning book Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the 18th Century (Louisiana State University Press). She traveled to archives across her home state as well as Texas, France and Spain to examine original manuscripts and colonial records. She pored over documents, some literally in pieces, and entered their information into a database she created.

"There's something magical about documents," she says. Though the records were "very hard to read and assess," Hall's ability to read French and Spanish (particularly in old-fashioned handwriting) and her knowledge of abbreviations helped her interpret and categorize them. She says, "Nobody realized the value of these documents" — which included court transcripts of slaves' testimony, records of purchases and manumission papers.