Michigan State University’s “Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade” website, or Enslaved.org, is a project, in partnership with other organizations, that documents the lives of named enslaved individuals of African descent. The project has published its latest data, making information regarding two million named Black Americans born before emancipation in the 1900 census available for discovery and download.

The team of scholars includes FamilySearch International, a nonprofit genealogical resource that helps people discover their family history, Brigham Young University and other organizations. The expanded dataset will significantly enhance the discoverability of formerly enslaved individuals and their families for academic research purposes.

After initial MSU-FamilySearch meetings in 2018 and several collaboration pilots, the team determined that the 1900 U.S. census was a valuable collection. In recent years, FamilySearch and BYU worked together to identify about 2 million named people in this collection who were born before emancipation in the United States, enslaved and free Blacks, along with links to original census images and Family Tree records. They have assembled information about these individuals into a searchable dataset and written an essay about the team’s methodology and conclusions from the data for Enslaved.org’s Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation.

“FamilySearch is the premier genealogical website in the world. It has an immense amount of searchable data about individuals who appear in a great range of primary sources — from censuses to baptismal records to birth records and more. Enslaved.org is excited and honored that FamilySearch is publishing a complete dataset through our project. This is a rare collaboration between a center that caters mostly to an academic audience and a nonprofit organization that caters to the general public,” said Walter Hawthorne, professor in MSU’s Department of History and head of the Enslaved.org project. 

“We’re honored to contribute to this important project that brings greater visibility to the lives and legacies of formerly enslaved individuals,” said Stephen Valentine, executive vice president for North America and Europe FamilySearch. “In addition to sharing this valuable dataset, we’re excited that scholars and descendants can access original historical images and linked family records in Family Tree. These connections enrich academic research and empower families to discover and preserve their heritage in deeply personal ways.”

With funding from donors, the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade” and the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation was created through Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University, in partnership with the MSU Department of History and scholars at several institutions. 

In recent years, a growing number of archives, databases and collections that organize and make sense of records of enslavement have become freely and readily accessible for scholarly and public consumption. These advancements come with their own set of challenges, including finding and accessing databases housed across multiple sites, as well as the preservation of these projects and resources. Enslaved.org is a constellation of software and services built to address these challenges. Its primary focus is people-individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves or participated in slave trading.

“Tracing people from the era of enslavement into the generations that followed emancipation presents exceptional challenges to descendants and researchers,” said Hawthorne.

According to Joseph Price at the BYU Record Linking Lab, “The crowdsourcing capabilities of Family Tree have been instrumental to the development of multiple record-linking projects and will enable the continued enhancement of the ‘Two Million Black Americans Born Prior to Emancipation in the 1900 U.S. Census’ dataset as a portal to deeper research possibilities. For descendants especially, access to Family Tree with free FamilySearch accounts allows users to explore their connections to formerly enslaved individuals and input their own genealogical information. These contributions by descendants, in turn, strengthen the scholarly research that integrates the Family Tree into its methodology, enriching our understanding of the lives of formerly enslaved people and their families.”