Family history website Ancestry has launched a new online collection of records of slaves in British colonies in the Caribbean.
The record set consists of 3,959,833 enslavement register records from the early 19th century.
The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807, while the 1811 Slave Trade Felony Act made it a felony to traffic enslaved people. However, some enslavers continued to illegally import and sell slaves. To prevent this, and due to concerns by antislavery activists about compliance with the law, slave owners were required to create records of their enslaved workers.
The registers are a rare written record of the hundreds of thousands of people of African descent enslaved in British colonies. They offer details such as an enslaved person’s name and age, when and where they were enslaved, and the name of their enslaver.
Slave ownership was abolished in the British Empire in 1833.
Dr Matthew J. Smith, director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London, said: “While these administrative documents managed an unjust system, today they serve as primary sources that expose the human scale and administrative mechanisms of British colonial slavery and offer an entry point into understanding the lives of those enslaved.”
Ancestry said it was making the records free to access as part of its commitment to preserving culturally significant, at-risk historical records. It has also launched an online guide to understanding the records.
Some of the records were previously available on Ancestry as digitised microfilm, but the new collection consists of digitised copies of the original registers from The National Archives, and includes the colonies of Bermuda, Cape of Good Hope, Montserrat, and parts of Guyana.
