via Registers of the Havana Slave Trade Commission | Desk of H.B. Lovejoy.

“Between 1808 and 1848, courts in Freetown, Sierra Leone and Havana, Cuba, charged with suppressing the transatlantic slave trade, meticulously recorded the African names and physical features (sex, age, height; and evidence of ethnic scarring and small pox) for almost 100,000 people rescued off slave ships. These records are known as “The Registers of Liberated Africans;” and they constitute a large and representative sample of an estimated 2.7 million people carried to the Americas after 1807 – the majority of whom landed in Brazil (1.9 million) and most of the rest in Cuba. Thus,  they may be the most cohesive body of documentation available for assessing where people came from in West Africa.

Although the Sierra Leone registers contain over 85,000 names, the focus is on the smaller, yet equally significant dataset made in Havana. I updated the Registers of the Havana Slave Trade Commission, 1824-1841. It totals 10,391 “liberated Africans.” It was made using digital copies of the original records. A team of historians made multiple revisions of the lettering for each name. To find out more about the making of this database please click here. The Havana Registers database is a small part of the African Names Database….”

For more information, click here. Many thanks to Linda Rodriguez for bringing this resource to our attention.