Digital archive makes records of 4m British slaves from 1800s searchable

Nearly 4 million records of enslaved people across 20 former British colonies have been made searchable online for the first time through a landmark digital archive.

Known as the Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers, the archive contains about 300,000 pages of historic documents dating from 1813 to 1840. The records cover former British colonial dependencies including the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Mauritius, Trinidad and the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, says The Guardian.

The digitisation and indexing project was carried out by genealogy company Ancestry in partnership with the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London (UCL), using the T71 collection held by The National Archives in London.

The registers were created by the British government after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. They were intended to monitor enslaved populations and enforce laws against illegal human trafficking.

The records contain details including names, estimated ages, colour classifications, whether individuals were African or Creole-born, physical descriptions, their mother's identity, family links, births, deaths and transfers of ownership. Some entries also recorded both enslaved names and previous names.

Nicka Sewell-Smith, a professional genealogist and senior story producer at Ancestry, said the records can now be used by descendants to trace their ancestry and reconstruct family histories.

"When I use these records to unearth my enslaved ancestors, I'm using them for a purpose that was different than what it was initially intended for. Our product is restoring the humanity of a person."

The records can contain detailed information about individuals, including dates of birth.

"You can pinpoint an exact birthday for an enslaved baby," Sewell-Smith said.

She said potentially millions of people across the African diaspora could have connections to those recorded in the archive.

"There are potentially millions of people who descended from the enslaved people in the archive," she said.

"Oftentimes, one of the ways that people detach from enslavement is to make an insinuation that there's nobody living connected to these people. That's foundationally not true."

Sewell-Smith said the archive could also help strengthen connections between descendants across the African diaspora.

"One of the things I'm very excited about is how much more interconnected it's going to make those of us in the diaspora," she said.

"It almost makes the world smaller. It tightens us up in a way that I don't think we even possibly considered."

Prof. Matthew J. Smith, director of UCL's Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, described the registers as "the most systematic set of archival documents we have on enslavement in the British Caribbean and British colonial world".

The digitised records could allow historians to focus more closely on the experiences of enslaved people, including their family structures, survival and resistance, rather than primarily on slave owners.

"The biggest piece of the story of British slavery, and it's also the most misunderstood piece, is the experience of the enslaved," Smith said.

"When you start to see the names of those individuals, and their ages, and their children, and get these very fine glimpses into their lives, it transforms how you understand the system."

Researchers testing the digitised data in Jamaica have already traced some families across six generations.

Smith said the records could help researchers recover "family stories, community stories, stories of survival, stories of resistance, stories of the search for freedom".

"It is painstaking work, but the rewards are tremendous," he said.

"It opens up a whole new way for descendants of enslaved people in the Caribbean, across the African diaspora, to understand how their heritage came to the Caribbean and survived slavery."

The digitised archive is free to search for anyone who creates an Ancestry account, removing the previous need to visit The National Archives in London to access the records.

"We're in a new space, in a new place," Smith said.

"As hard as it is to look at this, it also makes me very excited for the descendants of all these people. They have a better chance to be able to get this information, to use it, and to connect with them."