Michigan State University’s “Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade” website has recently published new data on more than 2 million Black Americans born before emancipation who were included in the 1900 census. The database will serve as a resource for future scholarship and for people seeking to discover their family history.
Alongside Michigan State University scholars, the project was led by researchers at Georgia State University, Brigham Young University in Utah, and FamilySearch International, a nonprofit genealogical organization. Although an exact percentage cannot be determined, the researchers estimate as much as 86 to 89 percent of the more than 2 million Black Americans over the age of 45 enumerated in 1900 were enslaved before emancipation.
The new dataset will open the door for numerous possible research applications. With several layers of demographic information available for each individual, the database includes links to original census images and family tree records. Furthermore, over 1.7 million individuals in the database have a Family Tree Person ID link that will bring users to an ancestors page on FamilySearch. There, users can add in missing data with accompanying historical record sources. Additionally, users who create a free FamilySearch account have the option to enter their own family tree data and potentially determine if and how they are related to these formerly enslaved and free Black Americans.
“Tracing people from the era of enslavement into the generations that followed emancipation presents exceptional challenges to descendants and researchers,” the project team writes. By compiling this comprehensive demographic data on Black Americans born at or before general emancipation, the researchers hope to “establish kinship and community networks of foundational knowledge essential for unearthing earlier generations to reconstruct relationships between formerly enslaved people, their immediate kin, their descendants, and the communities in which they lived.”
