Nearly 4 Million Records Of Enslaved People Are Now Searchable Online

The records include names, ages, physical descriptions and family relationships, as well as births, deaths, and transfers of ownership.

Nearly 4 million records documenting enslaved people across 20 former British colonies are now searchable online, providing descendants across the African and Caribbean diasporas with new access to names, family relationships, and other details that could help reconstruct ancestral histories disrupted by slavery, The Guardian reports.

The Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers contain about 300,000 pages documenting enslaved people from 1813 to 1840 in territories including Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Trinidad, Mauritius, and the Cape of Good Hope in present-day South Africa. Genealogy company Ancestry digitized and indexed the collection in partnership with University College London Center for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, according to the outlet.

The records include names, ages, physical descriptions, and family relationships, as well as births, deaths, and transfers of ownership. Some entries also indicate whether a person was born in Africa or the Caribbean, providing details that could help descendants establish connections between generations.

The British government created the registers after abolishing the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 as part of efforts to prevent the illegal trafficking of enslaved people and monitor enslaved populations. More than two centuries later, records originally created to document people held as property are being used to help descendants reconstruct their family histories.

Nicka Sewell-Smith, a professional genealogist and senior story producer at Ancestry, said the records take on a different purpose when used by descendants researching their ancestors.

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“Our product is restoring the humanity of a person,” Sewell-Smith told the outlet.

Matthew J. Smith, director of UCL’s Center for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, described the registers as the most systematic collection of archival documents on enslavement across the British Caribbean and broader British colonial world. Researchers examining Jamaican records have already used the data to trace some families across six generations, the outlet reports.

UCL’s work extends beyond the newly searchable collection. Its Valuable Lives project is developing a publicly accessible database focused on Black lives under British slavery, using records from Jamaica to connect enslaved people with descendants and communities. The project is being conducted in partnership with The National Archives and Ancestry.

The newly searchable records could be particularly significant for people across the Caribbean and wider African diaspora whose efforts to trace their ancestry encounter gaps created by enslavement and colonial recordkeeping.