The Guardian reports today that nearly 4 million records of enslaved people across 20 former British colonies are now searchable online.
Making these records searchable is an enormously important development, particularly for descendants across the Caribbean and its diaspora. For generations, so much of the documentary history of slavery has centred on slave owners, merchants and compensation claimants. These registers give us an opportunity to shift the focus towards the enslaved people themselves: their names, families, movements and experiences.
This is very closely connected to the work we are doing through Depths of Paradise for Grenada.
We are linking the surviving registers together so that individuals and families can be followed through time. We can see births and deaths, family relationships, movements between estates, sales, manumissions and, ultimately, the transition from slavery through emancipation and apprenticeship.
For me, that is where the real potential of these records lies. A name in a register is important, but when that name can be connected to parents, children, siblings, estates and later records, we begin to recover a life.
It also complements our wider Depths of Paradise research into Grenada during the apprenticeship period of 1834–38. By bringing these different sources together, we will be telling stories that reveal resilience, survival and lives beyond slavery.
