Simpson Library’s Head of Special Collections and Digital Scholarship Angie Kemp (middle in green) and team accepting HFFI award
Angie Kemp, Head of Special Collections and Digital Scholarship at Simpson Library, has been awarded the 2026 Special Recognition Award from the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation, Inc. (HFFI). The award honors individuals, groups or organizations that demonstrate notable leadership and initiative in support of preservation education in the Fredericksburg area and beyond.
Kemp and her Special Collections team received this award for their efforts to digitize, index, transcribe, and make available online a large collection of 18th and 19th century property records, in the form of insurance policies from Mutual Assurance Society of Virginia, the oldest insurance company in the state. Mutual Assurance shared in the HFFI award.
These property records include names of homeowners, the location and size of each property, and the monetary value of each structure. Many of the policies have detailed structural drawings of homes and other buildings, indicating what they were made of and how many rooms they had. For genealogists, historic preservationists, and others who care about the history and evolution of towns and cities in Virginia, these records reveal a great deal of valuable information that was previously inaccessible for most.
Kemp’s innovative approach uses XML and other tools to batch-process index data that was previously compiled and published by UMW’s Center for Historic Preservation to create a searchable transcription of each policy with much of the custom, handwritten information automatically added. More information about the project and the complete list of students who have worked on the team are available in the project summary.
The award was presented at HFFI’s Annual Meeting on Saturday, March 14, 2026.
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