This is a brief guide to finding records of slavery or slave owners. The most important records for identifying slaves are the local slave registers, 1812 to 1851. Registers from 1812 to 1834 can be viewed online (£There may be a charge for accessing this information. Searching indexes may be free.). The National Archives holds duplicates from 1812 to 1851. It is difficult to find particular slaves, and registers can be complicated to search.
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What do I need to know before I start?
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Try to find out:
- the name of the slave and the slave owner, including possible variations in spelling
- where they lived, including the parish if possible
- as much information as possible about dates of births, marriages and deaths
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What records can I see online?
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Slave registers (1812-1834)
Search by name, date of birth, colonial dependency, parish, owner's name or keyword in the Slave Registers of former British Colonial Dependencies, 1812-1834 on ancestry.co.uk (£There may be a charge for accessing this information. Searching indexes may be free.).
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What records can I find at The National Archives at Kew?
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Slave registers and records of the Slave Compensation Commission (1812-1851)
Browse T 71 in Discovery, our cataloguea search tool with descriptions of tens of millions of documents from the UK central government, law courts, and other national bodies, for records of the Office of Registry of Colonial Slaves and Slave Compensation Commission.
Most registers have indexes to slave owners and estates and give the name of the parish or district where they lived. Some colonies have indexed slaves by name under the name of the slave owner or plantation.
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To access these records you will either need to visit us, pay for research (£there will be a charge) or, where you can identify a specific record referencea unique set of letters and numbers identifying a document in The National Archives, order a copy (£there will be a charge).
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What records can I find in other archives and organisations?
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Records held locally
Search by family name of slave owner or by the name of their estate on the Access to Archives (A2A) and National Register of Archives (NRA) databases, if the slave owner settled in the UK.
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Records held in the archives of other countries
Contact archives and libraries in the country where the slave or slave owner you are looking for lived. Find contact details on ARCHON.
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What other resources will help me find information?
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Websites
Read Researching African-Caribbean family history in the family history section of the BBC website.
Read the articles on slaves and slavery on Your Archives.
Use the database on the Legacies of British slave-ownership website to search for a slave-owner or an individual related professionally or personally to a slave-owner.
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Books
Read Tracing Your Carribean Ancestors by Guy Grannum, third edition 2012, Bloomsbury.
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Colonies and dependencies
Wills or administrations before 1858