Crowdsourcing and the Development of an Overview of the Diaspora of “Liberated Africans”

After 1807, just over 200,000 people were intercepted as they crossed the Atlantic on their way to spending the rest of their lives as slaves in the New World. Some 25,000 died before reaching port but the survivors were designated as “Liberated Africans” and gained a new status that varied over a wide range of possibilities but rarely involved full re-enslavement. Detailed records of 92,000 “re-captives” have survived including their African names and physical descriptions that in turn allow the identification of the language and geographical origin of many of the re-captives. The www.slavevoyages.org site has displayed information on the detained vessels on which they were confined, and encourages the public to edit this information and thus pinpoint embarkation points of re-captives. The www.africa-origins.org site has displayed the names of the re-captives and provided pronunciations of those names that the public might recognize and identify for us. The feedback from both sites has permitted the reconstruction of a profile of what has come to be called the Liberated African diaspora, spanning the years 1808-1862. For this substantial sliver of data from the last 60 years of the transatlantic slave trade – which is broadly representative of all transatlantic slave trading activity of the time – we are able to harvest not only patterns of origins of enslaved Africans, but also what happened to them. This paper discusses the methodology and presents the broad overview of our findings to date.