4m Enslaved People Records Now Online

Nearly 4 million records of enslaved people in 20 former British colonies are now searchable online, thanks to a partnership between Ancestry and the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London.

The records, known as the Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers, contain detailed information about enslaved people between 1813 and 1840. The collection includes records from the Bahamas, Barbados, the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, Jamaica, Mauritius, and Trinidad.

The records were created by the British government after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. They were designed to prevent illegal trading of enslaved people and to monitor the enslaved population. The collection contains about 300,000 pages recording enslaved people across former British colonial dependencies.

The records include names, ages, physical descriptions, and family ties, as well as births, deaths, and transfers of ownership. This level of detail can be used to reconstruct family histories, according to Nicka Sewell-Smith, a professional genealogist and senior story producer at Ancestry.

## Why it matters The digitisation of these records is expected to be useful for millions of people who descended from the enslaved people in the archive. The collection offers one of the most extensive surviving archives of British enslavement, potentially helping people uncover their family histories. The fact that records originally created to count enslaved people as property are now being used by their descendants to reconstruct their family histories is a significant development.

The partnership between Ancestry and the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London has made these records accessible to a global audience. The collection is a valuable resource for researchers and individuals looking to learn more about their ancestors and the history of enslavement in the British colonies.