Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade, a free, public clearinghouse that launched Tuesday with seven smaller, searchable databases, will for the first time allow anyone from academic historians to amateur family genealogists to search for individual enslaved people around the globe in one central online location.
It launches four centuries after the first enslaved Africans arrived on the shores of the English colony of Virginia in 1619. By then, the transatlantic slave trade was already more than a century old.
Directed by data scientists at Michigan State University and four principal investigators, including Williams at U-Md., the project debuted with information about 500,000 named enslaved people and their circumstances, collected by some of the world’s foremost historians of slavery. More records of enslaved people, ethnic groups, populations and places will be entered over time as partnerships are forged with academics, archives, museums and other repositories of information.
As it evolves, Enslaved.org, founded with a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “will revolutionize our access to the past lives and experiences of our enslaved ancestors more dramatically and more definitively than any other research project,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University and a partner in the project.
At a time when the United States is grappling with its slave-owning past, the project also has the potential to help the nation more fully face its history, Gates said.
“We cannot right the wrongs of the present without a fuller and deeper knowledge of the slave past, which is such an important part of American history, inextricably intertwined with the noble ideas embodied in our founding documents,” he said. “… Until now so much of the historic record has been buried or available in fragments.”
'Several million names’
For centuries, the lived experiences of enslaved people were overshadowed by numbers: the 350-year slave trade, more than 43,000 transatlantic voyages, 12.5 million Africans forced onto European and American slave ships, only 10.8 million of whom survived the Middle Passage to arrive on foreign shores.
Brazil received the most enslaved Africans: 4.9 million. Just 388,000 arrived in North America, although by 1860 nearly 4 million lived in bondage in the United States. Human identity often took a back seat, especially in non-Catholic jurisdictions, to the monetary value and commercial description of enslaved people, found in tax registers, probate and insurance records, lawsuits, bills of sale.
There are lengthy histories of just a handful of named enslaved African Americans — think Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass — because the data is not organized to allow for that. Slavery historians have tended to work in silos, traveling the Atlantic world at great expense to scour records that are often poorly preserved, said Dean Rehberger, a principal investigator and director of Matrix, the Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State. Their findings are generally not broadly shared.