The Cowenhoven Project is a digital humanities initiative dedicated to recovering and sharing the lives of people of African descent enslaved by the Van Kouwenhoven-Conover family in New York and New Jersey. Combining archival research, genealogical scholarship, and data science, the project traces individuals through records such as wills, receipts, baptism registers, and census documents. Each recovered name is added to an open, interconnected dataset and presented in a profile that can help descendants and researchers explore family histories.

The website offers searchable profiles of enslaved people and documented biographies of enslavers, alongside interactive family trees, maps, and three-dimensional network visualizations linking people, events, sources, and places. Visitors can also explore historical locations, including farms, churches, graveyards, and markers, and learn about the project’s methods, data model, and progress. Focused on a prominent Dutch American family network, the project shows how studying enslavers’ genealogies can help trace enslaved people across generations and state borders.