The North-Atlantic Slave Trade has made it nearly impossible for millions of people to identify their lineage and ancestors. A new program through Michigan State University aims to change that.
In December, the university launched enslaved.org, a searchable database that contains millions of records representing enslaved Africans and their descendants.
“Enslaved.org is it has the capacity to link datasets to allow individuals to search for enslaved the same enslaved person across multiple data sets so that you can begin to put together a story about an enslaved person.” Walter Hawthorne, enslaved.org Investigator
Walter Hawthorne is the project co-investigator of enslaved.org and an MSU history professor. “For me as a historian, and I think for anybody who reads history, there’s a lot of power when you’re reading about the history of a named individual,” he says.