Marco Werman: So why were these records made in the first place?

Matthew Smith: The records were made because after the transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1807, many of the abolitionists believed that it would be a natural ending, if you will, of the system of slavery in the British colonies. But in fact, that didn’t happen. What they started to notice was that there was a deepening of the system, and they were concerned that there could be possible trafficking of people illegally into the British territories. So the registers were meant to monitor the trafficking of persons, and also to keep control of these enslaved societies.

Matthew, you said the data in these records is very detailed. Just how detailed are we talking about?

Well, the data gives us material we don’t normally find in many records documenting enslaved persons. That varies a good bit. So on some islands, you may find details such as people’s occupations. Others, you don’t have that level of detail. Generally, for most, you’ll have a name, not always a surname, but most often just a single identifying name, age and maternal lines. You also have what’s referred to as increase and decrease, which can be very upsetting aspects of this material to look at: [it] essentially indicates the number of persons born, but also the number of persons who have died over the years, the gaps between the records. So these were filed or recorded every three years in these colonies.

How do you see these many details expanding our understanding of the people who were subjugated by the system of slavery?

The potential for it, I think, is remarkable because what we’re able to do is essentially use the database and the records as they’re kept presently on Ancestry to find connections in ways that would’ve been much more labor-intensive using the paper records. So now you’re able to go on and identify where persons are and try to find lines of family connections that way. For us at the Center for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at UCL, we’re also really interested in the potential of understanding community stories. What happened to these areas where certain social networks were forged in these particular places where slavery existed? And how can we do detailed comparisons across one place or even across multiple colonies? And that’s really, I think, one of the great potential game changers of this kind of material now that we have it digitized in the way that it’s now digitized. Historians have been using this material for a very long time. Now that the general public has wide access to it, people may draw information from this data that we haven’t seen before.

Well, most enslavers would’ve been keeping some form of records of their enslaved populations, and some of those have survived. We also find traces of the lives of enslaved persons in other types of record sets and so on. Whether it’s legal records, we can find some of that. It depends on colony to colony; you can find that material. What these records have, and what’s particularly significant, is a systematic way they were recorded. And that’s what I think is very valuable with this particular collection.

So, I want to just underscore your partnership with Ancestry. Why was that necessary?

Ancestry decided to make these records free and open access for everyone globally. And they’re partnering with the National Archives UK on the digitization and accessibility of those records on their site. We were brought in at the Center for the Study of the Legacy of British Slavery at University College London to help give historical context to the records. We understand that they are sensitive records. We understand the historical import of these records. And as a center that really is focused on a research-oriented approach to understanding slavery in the British Caribbean, in a way that focuses on the lives of the enslaved persons, we felt it was really necessary, once we were invited by Ancestry, to help them work through the historical context of the records. 

Ancestry, obviously, is a genealogy company; it profits from genealogy and genetic research. Do you have any concerns about the implications created by that?

We were very encouraged that Ancestry [decided] not to make this material something you had to pay to view. That’s important to the work that we do at the center: everything we do is public history, and it’s meant for free, open access. And these records are free and open access globally.

You mentioned how Jamaica’s really looking hard at this. Many countries, especially in the Caribbean, have been pushing for the UK to return some form of reparations to the descendants of slaves. What impact do you think these 4 million records could have on those efforts?

When you begin to look at sets of records that actually identify human beings as individuals, as unique persons, and you see age, maternal lines, names … that gives you a very different understanding of what the human cost of enslavement was. And any set of records where you have that level of information made available to people, I think, is really crucial because it helps us begin to understand the complexities of this system. And the afterlives of that system as they functioned in societies post-slavery, for which many claims for reparations are made, begin to look different because now we have a firmer sense of the persons who were affected. It’s also worth saying, Marco, that these records document what we’d say is the last phase of British slavery. This is also about an institution that lasted centuries before these records started to be produced. So it is quite humbling to think about that aspect of it, that there are many people who will not be able to be identified on these sorts of records, whose lives were completely controlled by a system of human bondage. That’s really important to bear in mind as well.

That shadow has really been cast quite large this past year. There’s your database that we’ve been discussing; also, just last week, the Register of British Slave Traders was published, a three-year project that revealed Great Britain’s massive role in the trafficking of enslaved Africans. The book “The Crown’s Silence” came out this year and examines the British monarchy and its role in that trafficking. In the US, there is new DNA evidence reaffirming that Thomas Jefferson had children with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings. What do you hope will be the end result of all this research and data?

Well, as a historian, I’m very, very interested in all of these projects that have been developed. And there are many of them that are happening now, which are really important. The slave traders database project that you mentioned is a very important one because it shows just how deeply tied slavery was to the mechanisms of control and investment in the trafficking of Africans to these colonies. This particular set of records, the one on the registers of enslaved persons, is also a big part of that puzzle because it now starts to show us the impact of that system on individuals when you start to use these records in conversation with others. What I really hope from this is that we’ll have generations of new research being produced from these very, very important projects and shifts that we’ve been seeing in public history. And from that, we’ll begin to understand and learn more about the history of slavery and why we need to sort of relate it to the afterlives that came long after the emancipation bills were passed in respective countries.