Ancestry and UCL release nearly 4 million enslavement records for online search

Created after 1807, registers were designed to prevent illegal trading and monitor the enslaved

Genealogy company Ancestry and the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London have together digitized and indexed nearly 4 million records documenting enslaved people across 20 former British colonies, making the archive freely searchable online. The collection, called the Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers, is held at Britain’s National Archives in London under the series designation T71 and contains about 300,000 pages compiled between 1813 and 1840.

The records cover former colonial dependencies including the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Mauritius, the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, and Trinidad. The British government created the registers after abolishing the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, intending them to prevent illegal trading of enslaved people and to monitor the enslaved population.

Entries in the registers record names, ages, physical descriptions, family ties, births, deaths, and transfers of ownership. Some entries distinguish whether a person was born in Africa or in the Caribbean, and Jamaican entries typically identify mothers in a remarks field. Researchers have noted that the level of detail can be extraordinary; in some cases, an enslaved baby’s exact birthday can be pinpointed.

Sewell-Smith said the digitization also removes a practical barrier for those interested in delving into their family histories. Instead of needing to know how to navigate registers in person at the National Archives in London, descendants can now search the collection simply by entering a name, she said.

Nicka Sewell-Smith, a professional genealogist and senior story producer at Ancestry, said the records’ original purpose had been to count enslaved people as property, and that using them now to reconstruct family histories amounts to a reversal of that intent. “When I use these records to unearth my enslaved ancestors, I’m using them for a purpose that was different than what it was initially intended for,” she said. “Our product is restoring the humanity of a person.”

Prof. Matthew J. Smith, director of the UCL centre, called the collection “the most systematic set of archival documents we have on enslavement in the British Caribbean and British colonial world.” He said the ability to see individual names, ages, and children transforms how the system of enslavement can be understood. “When you start to see the names of those individuals, and their ages, and their children, and get these very fine glimpses into their lives, it transforms how you understand the system,” he said.

Researchers at the centre have been testing the data in their work on Jamaica, where they have been able to trace some families across six generations, according to Smith. “It is painstaking work, but the rewards are tremendous,” he said. “It opens up a whole new way for descendants of enslaved people in the Caribbean, across the African diaspora, to understand how their heritage came to the Caribbean and survived slavery.”

The release of the T71 collection follows the publication the previous week of the Register of British Slave Traders, a separate three-year research project that identified as many as 10,500 people who invested in the trafficking of enslaved Africans over nearly 250 years. The T71 release comes amid growing calls from researchers — including Smith — to shift the focus of slavery scholarship from enslavers, traders, and administrators toward the lives of the enslaved themselves.

Smith said the T71 records make that shift possible in ways prior archives could not. “The biggest piece of the story of British slavery, and it’s also the most misunderstood piece, is the experience of the enslaved,” he said.

Sewell-Smith said the archive’s potential extends beyond Britain and the Caribbean, because migration and the forced movement of people under enslavement mean descendants can be found across the African diaspora, including in the United States and Latin America. She said she expected the collection to make the diaspora more interconnected as researchers connect its records with other archives.

Sewell-Smith disputed the suggestion that no living descendants remain connected to the people documented in the archive. “There are potentially millions of people who descended from the enslaved people in the archive,” she said. “Oftentimes, one of the ways that people detach from enslavement is to make an insinuation that there’s nobody living connected to these people. That’s foundationally not true.”

Smith framed the release as the beginning of a new research environment. “We’re in a new space, in a new place,” he said. “As hard as it is to look at this, it also makes me very excited for the descendants of all these people. They have a better chance to be able to get this information, to use it, and to connect with them.”

The collection is free to search and accessible to anyone who creates an Ancestry account.