Your Ancestors May Be in This Archive: Millions of Enslavement Records Now Searchable

In 1813, the British government created the Enslavement Registers to monitor Black folks as property and prevent illegal human trafficking. Irony has a way of correcting wrongs: two centuries later, those exact ledgers have become one of the most powerful tools Black families have to restore their ancestors’ humanity.

Through a new partnership between Ancestry and University College London’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, the Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers are now indexed and free to search online. The collection gives descendants across the global African diaspora unprecedented access to millions of enslaved ancestors’ records—helping families reclaim roots and uncover lineages that were intentionally erased.

The groundbreaking collection unlocks records for descendants across the African Caribbean and African diasporas, offering the most extensive surviving archives of British enslavement in history, according to the Guardian.

“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,” Nicka Sewell-Smith, a genealogist and senior story producer at Ancestry, told the Guardian. “Our product is restoring the humanity of a person.” And that it is.

The collection is so vast, researchers say people were recorded in the registers with meticulous precision in what experts called “the most systematic set of archival documents we have on enslavement in the British Caribbean and British colonial world.”

The collection—free to search for anyone with an Ancestry account—contains nearly 300,000 pages of breathtakingly intimate details documenting enslaved people between 1813 and 1840. Within those records lie names, ages, physical descriptions, family ties, birth and death dates, transfers of ownership, and even whether an ancestor was born in Africa or the Caribbean.

Researchers who tested the data on Jamaica have been able to trace some families across six generations.

RELATED: Real Truth and Lies About Slavery You Must Know

“There are potentially millions of people who descended from the enslaved people in the archive,” Sewell-Smith 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.”

That profound truth echoes far beyond England, sparking new local movements to give the enslaved their names back stateside.

Over in Georgia, more than 4,500 people who were enslaved are now being remembered through a new project, “Finding Their Names,” at the University of Georgia (UGA).

UGA digitized old documents and archival collections that were previously difficult to locate and interpret to create a searchable digital archive, according to 11Alive.

The records—which may be useful for those researching the history of land ownership, sales in Georgia, and information related to reparations—include handwritten legal and financial documents that may have remained hidden for generations. They are available for free through the Digital Library of Georgia.

“One of the things I’m very excited about is how much more interconnected it’s going to make those of us in the diaspora,” Sewell-Smith said of Ancestry’s collection. “It almost makes the world smaller. It tightens us up in a way that I don’t think we even possibly considered.”