Slave Voyage Database & Slave Registers for British Colonies
A great source on researching your African ancestors is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Voyages website. The website contains over 36,000 Voyages of enslaved Africans. This website covers the entire globe so this will pertain to all islands and countries were Africans were forced into labor.Ancestry also has a great number of databases in their catalog. One of their databases is called the Slave Registers of former British Colonial Dependencies 1813 – 1834. I was able to access it directly and for free.
The database contains a list of slave records for the following islands or countries. Do not be surprised if you have done your DNA to discover cousins from Sri Lanka or Mauritius as you can see from the below list that enslaved people were take there too:
- Antigua (1817-1818, 1821, 1824, 1828, 1832)
- Bahamas (1822, 1825, 1828, 1831, 1834)
- Barbados (1817, 1820, 1823, 1826, 1829, 1832, 1834)
- Berbice (Guyana today) (1818-1819, 1822)
- Dominica (1817, 1820, 1823)
- Grenada (1817-1834)
- Honduras (1834)
- Jamaica (1817, 1820, 1823, 1826, 1829, 1832, 1834)
- Mauritius (Indian Ocean) (1817, 1819, 1822, 1826, 1830, 1832, 1835)
- Nevis (1817, 1822, 1825, 1828, 1831)
- Sri Lanka (Ceylon) (1818-1832)
- St Christopher (1817, 1822, 1825, 1827-1828, 1831, 1834)
- St Lucia (1815, 1819)
- St Vincent (1817, 1822, 1825, 1828, 1831, 1834)
- Tobago (1819-1834)
- Trinidad (1813, 1815-1816, 1819, 1822, 1825, 1828, 1831, 1834)
- Virgin Islands (1818, 1822, 1825, 1828, 1831, 1834)
Ancestry also points out what they do not have but that you can located them at the UK National Archive in paper format. You can check with the website to determine if they are available for download. They are as follows and the information below I retrieved it from Ancestry:
- Jamaica (pieces 193, 206-208)
- St Christopher (pieces 261-263)
- Grenada (piece 264, 266)
- Dominica (pieces 359-363)
- Nevis (piece 369)
- St Lucia (pieces 382-390)
- Demerara (pieces 391-436)
- Berbice (pieces 441-446)
- Montserrat (pieces 447-451)
- Bermuda (pieces 452-455)
- St Vincent (pieces 494, 496)
- Mauritius (piece 566, 571)
- Cape of Good Hope (pieces 652-662)
Most importantly, I pointed out in my prior post that the UK National Archive has many resources for you to research.
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| Slaves in Vale do Paraiba Sao Paulo (Brazil) 1885 |