Colonial Slave Registers to be searcheable online free from Ancestry
27 April 2007
Ancestry UK is to make available a database containing the names of British colonial slaves to enable slave descendants to find out more about their elusive ancestors.
The fully searcheable collection of the names of 3 million slaves has been taken from the various territories the existed across the British Empire in the 1800s. In total, there are 700 existing registers in 23 of the British Territories and these will become available online within 12 months, and will be free to search.enealogy, family tree, family history, slave egisters, slavery, records, colonies, ancestry
Already up is the 1834 Barbados Slave Register. Other registers to be completed soon were originally written between 1813 and 1834 and were started to try to reduce the slave trade in the British colonies. The slave trade was abolished in 1807 but slavery did not become illegal until 1834, so this mismatch occurred.To ensure that plantation owners did not buy new slaves during the period when they could legally had slaves, the registers were required for monitoring purposes.
Slaves censuses were done by colonies every three years and details of slave owners were also recorded. One copy was kept at the plantation and a copy was also sent to the Office for the Registry of Colonial Slaves. This office was disbanded after 1834 and many of the lists of names were sent to the British National Archives in Kew, London.
Although estimates vary, researchers say tens of millions of African men, women and children were enslaved and shipped to the Caribbean and the Americas. Many of these were sent to British-controlled islands such as Barbados, Jamaica and the Bahamas, where they were forced to work in plantations.
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