Nearly 4m records of enslaved people in 20 former British colonies now searchable online

Aamna Modhin, The Guardian

Exclusive: Collection’s 300,000 pages record lives of enslaved people in countries including the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa and Trinidad

Nearly 4m records documenting the lives of enslaved people across 20 former British colonies have been made searchable online for the first time.

The records have been digitised and indexed by the genealogy company Ancestry, which has partnered with the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London.

The global collection offers millions of descendants across the African-Caribbean and wider African diasporas access to one of the most extensive surviving archives of British enslavement, potentially helping them uncover family histories.

The collection, known as the Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers, contains about 300,000 pages recording enslaved people across former British colonial dependencies between 1813 and 1840, including the Bahamas, Barbados, the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, Jamaica, Mauritius and Trinidad.

When you see the names of individuals and their ages and their children … it transforms how you understand the system

The registers were created by the British government after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, and were designed to prevent illegal trading of enslaved people and to monitor the enslaved population.

Researchers say people were recorded in the registers with chilling precision. Entries include names, ages, physical descriptions and family ties, as well as births, deaths and transfers of ownership. Some distinguish whether a person was born in Africa or in the Caribbean.

Nicka Sewell-Smith, a professional genealogist and senior story producer at Ancestry, said it was not lost on her that records originally created to count enslaved people as property were now being used by their descendants to reconstruct their family histories.

Learn more about this project.

Read about slavery in the UK’s largest former colony, the USA.

This year’s breaking news has included multiple stories about the monarchy’s involvement with slavery.