Web Site Links African-Americans to Ancestors' Voyage

A new online database details the journeys of millions of slaves. Twelve and a half million slaves were transported from Africa to the United States as early as the 16th Century. For the first time a new free Internet database gives African-Americans the opportunity to explore their African heritage the way whites have long been able to chart their migration from Europe.

Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is the result of 40 years of research by hundreds of scholars. Two years ago, Emory University researchers, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, began compiling maps, images, and other records of about 35,000 slave-trade voyages from Africa to North America, Brazil, the Caribbean and Europe. It is the first time such a large amount of data on the subject has been available to the public.

"The records for people of Africa and the Americas are better than the records of connections between Europe and the Americas for the simple reason that slaves were property," said David Eltis, a history professor at Emory and a director of the project. "No one cared what happened to free migrants. They did care what happened to slaves, because they were making money from them."

While the database can establish the regions slave ships launched from in Africa and where they arrived in the United States, it generally is impossible to determine which ancestors were on board, researchers said, because the records have African names that were changed when the slaves arrived in North America.

You can read more in the Chicago Tribune at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-slave-trade_bdjan04,0,6302223.story.

Comments

[Carlos]

I'm confused about the second sentence in this article. If the Plymouth Colony dates to about 1620 and Jamestown about a dozen years before that (1607), who was in the 'United States' in the 16th century (1500's) to utilize all those slaves?

[bob]

If you can't track an ancestor in the records, then how could the following statement be true? "The records for people of Africa and the Americas are better than the records of connections between Europe and the Americas for the simple reason that slaves were property."

If you look at books on the social history of white convicts and Germans in Colonial America, you can follow their ships too, just like these slave ships.

[Dick Eastman]

---> who was in the 'United States' in the 16th century (1500's) to utilize all those slaves?

St. Augustine, in what is now called Florida, founded in 1565.

The following is from http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_florida_slavery.htm

Under the terms of the asiento (agreement to settle Florida) issued by Philip II, Menéndez had three years to import 500 Africans slaves to the new colony to cultivate and mill sugar, as well as to assist in constructing towns and performing agricultural work. Evidence suggests that enslaved African artisans and agricultural laborers from Cuba arrived with Menéndez in 1565; a second phase of settlement in 1568 records one female slave and one male slave among 200 new settlers.

[Richard]

In your article you state that "Twelve and a half million slaves were transported from Africa to the United States as early as the 16th Century." If you read further down in the Tribune article, you will see that was the total number of slaves shipped out of Africa to the Western Hemisphere. Only 4% of those came to North America. That number, in and of itself, is too horrible to comprehend.

As Westerners, we are often condemned for our trade in slaves. Very little, however, is ever said about the Africans who hauled these twelve and one half million people from their homes in Africa to the African coast and then sold them into slavery. Sadly enough, slavery is still alive and well over a great deal of the African continent. Why haven't they learned?

[Bobbie]

Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
URL: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces

[Sharon]

I think the website URL is: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces