Slave records go online in anniversary year

An online archive detailing the names of slaves traded by the British has been launched as part of a series of events marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain.

Ancestry.co.uk documents nearly 100,000 slaves owned by British colonists in Barbados during the early 19th Century and aims to eventually detail three million names.

The site, which is free, has taken the first step in the project by listing the 1834 Barbados Slave Register which has the names of 99,349 slaves, and 5,206 slave owners, working out at an average of 19 slaves per owner.

The online register is taken from the records kept by the British government in the form of the Former Colonial Dependencies' Slave Register Collection.

The register was kept between 1812 and 1834 and documented any slave bought, sold, imported, exported or inherited within the colonies. However the records were inconsistent because of their reliance on the participation of slave owners and the low literacy levels of African slaves.

The Abolition of Slave Trade Act , passed in 1807, made it illegal to trade slaves from Africa to British colonies but slavery itself wasn’t abolished until 1834.

Over almost 200 years from the mid-1600s hundreds of thousands of black slaves were taken from Africa to work the sugar plantations in the British colonies.

Ancestry hopes to complete the project listing all the registers kept
between 1812 and 1834 online by the end of this year.

A spokesman for Ancestry said: ‘What we hope to achieve is for those
interested in tracing their ancestry and solving the mystery in their family tree can do so for free. It’s quite a rare collection.’

www.ancestry.co.uk

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