Library Guides: Slavery: Identities & Biographies

Identities & Biographies

Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy
Information on 100,000 slaves in Louisiana during the 18th and 19th centuries

Biographical Dictionary of Enslaved Black People in the Maritimes
This biographical dictionary recovers the stories and illuminates the lives of enslaved Black people in the Maritimes.

Confederate Slave Payrolls
This series is comprised of payrolls for slave labor on Confederate military defenses, including forts, entrenchments, obstructions on navigable rivers, "nitre" works, harness-making shops, ordnance works, and arsenals, in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
Enslaved Peoples of the HIstorical Slave Trade
Browse People, Events, Places and Sources
Former British Colonial Dependencies, Slave Registers, 1813-1834
To combat illicit transportation following the 1807 Abolition of Slave Trade Act, many of the British Colonies began keeping registers of black slaves who had been so-called “lawfully enslaved”. In 1819 the Office for the Registry of Colonial Slaves was established in London and copies of the slave registers kept by the colonies were sent to this office. Registration generally occurred once every three years. The registers continue through to 1834 when slavery was officially abolished.
Omar Ibn Said Collection
The Omar Ibn Said Collection consists of 42 digitized documents in both English and Arabic, including an 1831 manuscript in Arabic on "The Life of Omar Ibn Said," a West African slave in America, which is the centerpiece of this unique collection of texts. Some of the manuscripts in this collection include texts in Arabic by another West African slave in Panama, and others from individuals located in West Africa.
Recovered Histories
Anti-Slavery International has digitised its collection of 18th and 19th century literature on the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Recovered Histories captures the narratives of the enslaved, enslavers, slave ship surgeons, abolitionists, parliamentarians, clergy, planters and rebels.
Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network
Data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World.
Virginia Untold
Database of slave names in Virginia gleaned from the manuscript collections of the Virginia Historical Society

U.S. Customs Service records, port of New Orleans, LA, Inward slave manifests, 1807-1860 [microform]
Call Number: MICROFILM 78004 Newspapers & Microforms
Manifest of slaves. Slaves are described by name, sex, age, stature, and class.
U.S. Customs Service records, port of New Orleans, LA, Outward slave manifests, 1812-1860 [microform]
Call Number: MICROFILM 78006 Newspapers & Microforms
Manifest of slaves. Slaves are described by name, sex, age, stature, and class.

Records

Slave Societies Digital Archive
Includes digitized ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and Afro-descended peoples in the Americas. While most of the documents contained here belong to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are also Cuban and Spanish Florida documents from the sixteenth century and Brazilian documents from the seventeenth.

Slave narratives

The Opinions Regarding Slavery: Slave Narrative collection consists of an original manuscript collection compiled by John Brother Cade, Sr., who was the Dean of Southern University.

The slave narrative collection is arranged by series. The collection consists of 229 reports of ex-slaves from 17 states and 1 country and measures 1.29 linear feet. The first series is the state of Alabama, which consists of 11 ex-slave reports. Series II, the state of Arkansas, with 4 ex-slave reports. Series III, the state of Florida has 1 report. Series IV, the state of Georgia, has 7 reports. Series V, the Indian Territory has 1 report. Series VI, the state of Kansas has 1 report. Series VII, the state of Kentucky consists of 10 reports. Series VIII, the state of Louisiana consists of 22 reports. Series IX, the state of Maryland has 2 reports. Series X, the state of Mississippi consists of 16 reports. Series XI, the state of Missouri has 9 reports. Series XII, the state of North Carolina consists of 8 reports. Series XIII, the state of Oklahoma (Territory) has 1 report. Series XIV, the state of South Carolina has 5 reports. Series XV, the state of Tennessee consists of 7 reports. Series XVI, the state of Texas consists of 106 reports. Series XVII, the state of Virginia consists of 17 reports. In the last Series XVIII, the country of Canada has 1 report.

The collection is accessible via JSTOR.

The WPA Slave Narrative Collection consists of narratives collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration. At the conclusion of the project, the edited transcripts were assembed and microfiled in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. The Library of Congress digitized the narratives and scanned from originals 500 photographs, creating the online collection, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938. This resource is searchable.

Volumes 2-17 of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, edited by George P. Rawick and others, present these narratives with a slightly different organization; the later volumes of Rawick's series also include ex-slave interviews housed in other archives. These volumes are available in the Main (Gardner) Stacks. Supplement, Series 1 is available in the Stacks and from NRLF. Supplement, Series 2 is available in the Stacks. There is also a name index for this resource and a subject index. The print volumes have also been digitized.

Anthologies containing selections from the Library of Congress collection include the Federal Writers' Project's Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, edited by B. A. Botkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945) and Voices from Slavery (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), edited by Norman R. Yetman.

Additional resources:

Africa remembered : narratives by West Africans from the era of the slave trade
Call Number: DT471 .C8 Main (Gardner) Stacks
American slavery as it is: Testimony of a thousand witnesses by Weld, Theodore Dwight
Abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld, his wife Angelina Grimke and her sister Sarah Grimkie composed this book of first-hand accounts of slavery, which was distributed by the American Anti-Slavery Society.

North American Slave Narratives
Includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920.
Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories
The recordings of former slaves in this collection took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. Twenty-two interviewees discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom.

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Slavery: Identities & Biographies

Identities & Biographies

Records

Slave narratives