Nearly four million records documenting enslaved people across 20 former British colonies have been digitized and made searchable online, creating a major new research resource for Caribbean families and the wider African diaspora.
The collection contains about 300,000 pages covering the period from 1813 to 1840, including records from Jamaica, Barbados, The Bahamas and Trinidad.
Entries can include names, ages, births, deaths, family relationships, physical descriptions and information showing whether an individual was born in Africa or the Caribbean.
The collection was indexed through work involving Ancestry and University College London’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, turning records originally created to administer enslavement into a tool descendants can use to reconstruct family and community history.