The Ledger

The Ledger, an award‐winning interactive database, contains biographical information about the students who attended Sarah Pierce\u27s Litchfield Female Academy and Tapping Reeve\u27s Litchfield Law School. Starting from antiquarian sources and subsequent print research from the 1980s and 1990s, the staff of the Litchfield Historical Society undertook manual data‐entry for thousands of students, their parents, spouses, instructors, and various prominent figures from within the Litchfield community. The pages for each individual include biographical data, images and descriptions of portraits, student artwork, and personal artifacts owned by students as well as links to collections of personal or family papers pertaining to specific students. The Society\u27s curators will discuss the challenges to creating this resource, from database design to informational content including how to keep progressing when grant funding has ended; attempting to reunite geographically disparate resources; and discovering whether the project meets the needs of its users. While there is much about The Ledger that has yet to be expanded, and subsequent use has revealed areas for improvement, it represents a starting point for examining a variety of social, political, and religious movements in the early national period and a prime example of how digital resources can shed light on the history of women