There is now a huge database to trace the history of enslaved Americans. From Smithsonian:
Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade, a newly launched digital database featuring 613,458 entries (and counting), seeks to streamline the research process by placing dozens of complex datasets in conservation with each other. If, for instance, a user searches for a woman whose transport to the Americas is documented in one database but whose later life is recorded in another, the portal can connect these details and synthesize them.
“We have these data sets, which have a lot of specific information taken in a particular way, [in] fragments,” says Daryle Williams, a historian at the University of Maryland and one of the project’s principal investigators. “... [If] you put enough fragments together and you put them together by name, by place, by chronology, you begin to have pieces of lives, which were lived in a whole way, even with the violence and the disruptions and the distortions of enslavement itself. We [can] begin then to construct or at least understand a narrative life.”
Funded through a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Enslaved.org—described by its creators as a “linked open data platform” featuring information on people, events and places involved in the transatlantic slave trade—marks the culmination of almost ten years of work by Williams and fellow principal investigators Walter Hawthorne, a historian at Michigan State University, and Dean Rehberger, director of Michigan State’s Matrix Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences.
Originally, the team conceived Enslaved.org as a space to simply house these different datasets, from baptismal records to runaway ads, ship manifests, bills of sale and emancipation documents. But, as Rehberger explains, “It became a project about how we can get datasets to interact with one another so that you can draw broader conclusions about slavery. … We’re going in there and grabbing all that data and trying to make sense of it, not just give [users] a whole long list of things.”
The project’s first phase launched earlier this month with searchable data from seven partner portals, including Slave Voyages, the Louisiana Slave Database and Legacies of British Slave-Ownership. Another 30 databases will be added over the next year, and the team expects the site to continue to grow for years to come. Museums, libraries, archives, historical societies, genealogy groups and individuals alike are encouraged to submit relevant materials for review and potential inclusion. (Read more.)
2 comments:
I am a person who, after experiencing a bad situation and dealing with it as best I can, moves on. I do not understand this Country's obsession with slavery. At first I believed it was the Left Wing Socialist Communist ideology of the Corporate Media who wanted to point out our Country's shameful past along with how some of the founding leaders of our Country had slaves. I do not believe it advances race relations. For example, the Roman Catholic Church experienced tremendous bias over the years but it exerted efforts to incorporate itself within the culture through charitable works, human rights, etc. When the Irish first immigrated to this Country they suffered painful discrimination. I am not suggesting that any of this equaled the suffering of human bondage, separation of families, cruelty, violence and death etc. experienced during slavery, I am just saying, let us move forward in a wholesome way to fight discrimination, violence, etc. that is part of life for contemporary African American citizens.
I just think it is wonderful that there are more and more tools available for all Americans to trace their ancestry, in spite of the often horrific circumstances of their arrival.
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