A Massive New Database Will Connect Billions of Historic Records to Tell the Full Story of American Slavery

By digging through archives, researchers can piece together the life stories of the millions of people who were enslaved in the Americas. (Illustration by Romy Blümel)

In 1834, a 22-year-old Yoruba man who would come to be known as Manuel Vidau was captured as a prisoner of war and sold to slave traders in Lagos, today the largest city in Nigeria. A Spanish ship transported him to Cuba, where he was sold to a white man who forced him to roll 400 cigars a day (if his pace slowed, he recalled, he would be “stripped, tied down and flogged with the cow hide”). A decade later, however, Vidau secured permission from a new owner to hire himself out, and with his earnings he bought a share in a lottery ticket—and won. That allowed him finally to buy his freedom. He married a fellow former slave, Maria Picard, and they adopted a young relative whose parents had died of cholera. Vidau supported his wife and son by continuing to roll cigars, eventually making enough money to cover their passage to England.

Vidau’s stroke of fortune is known today only because he had a chance encounter with a representative of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. The organization recorded his story in its journal, which was later shelved in a university library, digitized and eventually collected in an online database called “Freedom Narratives.” Enslaved people like Vidau—torn away from their communities of origin, deprived of the ability to write about themselves and treated as cargo or property in official documents—often left little of themselves to the historic record. Still, even a few facts can shape the outline of a life of sorrow, adversity, perseverance and triumph.

“One of the biggest challenges in slave studies is this idea that people were unknowable, that the slave trade destroyed individuality,” says Daryle Williams, a historian at the University of Maryland. “But the slave trade didn’t erase people. We have all kinds of information that’s knowable—property records, records related to births, deaths and marriages. There are billions of records. It just takes a lot of time to go look at them, and to trace the arc of an individual life.”

Williams, a specialist in the African diaspora of Brazil, is one of the principal investigators of a massive new online database called “Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade,” which will launch in 2020. It aims to serve as a clearinghouse for information about enslaved people and their captors. Headquartered at Matrix, the Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University, and funded by a founding $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, Enslaved will serve as a hub for many smaller digitization projects, Freedom Narratives among them. For the first time, says Williams, anyone from academic historians to amateur genealogists will be able trace individuals, families, ethnic groups and populations through dozens, hundreds or even thousands of archives, making connections that will enrich our understanding of slavery.

“This tool,” Williams says, “will have the potential to show that even in the context of this horrible crime, there are still threads that hold people’s lives together.”