Slavery » United States

Johnston County Heritage Center - Genealogical Research

Smithfield, North Carolina. We hold approximately 2,500 books, 800 reels of microfilm, 300 maps/atlases, 100,000 photographic images, 600 private collections of books and papers, and vertical files on genealogy, biography, and local history. The focus for genealogical records primarily includes the eastern half of North Carolina and the Virginia Tidewater region.

Landscape of Liberation - The African American Geography of Civil War Tennessee

An interactive map showing the landscape of emancipation as it unfolded from 1861 to 1865. Every point on the map is linked to primary documents and images that tell the story of people, places, and events.

Large Slaveholders of 1860 and African American Surname Matches from 1870

Large Slaveholders of 1860 and African American Surname Matches from 1870

Library of Congress - Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938

Library of Congress - Digital Collections - Slaves and the Courts, 1740 to 1860

This collection consists of 105 library books and manuscripts, totalling approximately 8,700 pages drawn principally from the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, with a few from the General Collections. The selection was guided in large part by the entries in Slavery in the Courtroom: An Annotated Bibliography of American Cases by Paul Finkelman (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1985), which was based on research in the Library collections. The documents comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance.

Library of Congress - Fugitive Slave Ads: Topics in Chronicling America

A guide for researching the topic of "fugitive slave ads" in the Chronicling America digital collection of historic newspapers.

Living with the Hydra - The Documentation of Slavery and the Slave Trade in Federal Records (NARA)

Living with the Hydra: The Documentation of Slavery and the Slave Trade in Federal Records

George Washington Williams's History of the Negro in American from 1619 to 1880 viewed slavery as a legal and political problem at the core of the new federal government.

Lost Friends Advertisements from the Southwestern Christian Advocate

The Lost Letters were letters written by loved ones searching for family members lost during slavery. It is a searchable database and contains letters written in the Advocate from November 1879 to December 1900 in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States

Scanned image of the map compiled from the census of 1860.

Maryland: Charles County Enslaved Persons and Slaveholders

An indexing project which lists names of enslaved persons and slaveholders in Charles County, Maryland

Mercy Street Revealed Blog - Kenyatta Berry

A series of blog posts about slavery by Kenyatta Berry.

Merseyside Maritime Museum

Liverpool, England.

Missouri Slave Data

Online searchable database and slave schedules.

National Park Service - Network to Freedom

A national Underground Railroad program to coordinate preservation and education efforts nationwide and integrate local historical places, museums, and interpretive programs associated with the Underground Railroad into a mosaic of community, regional, and national stories.

National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

National Park museum under construction in Cincinnati. Will contain records pertaining to all slavery-era persons. Collecting oral history on Underground Railroad sites and stories.

New Jersey Slavery Records New!

The New Jersey Slavery Records project builds on the work of Rutgers historians who took a deep dive into the historical connections between slavery and the university and wrote the book Scarlet and Black, Volume 1: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, edited by Deborah Gray White and Marisa Fuentes. The researchers went on to trace Rutgers Black history to the present in Volumes 2 and 3. Following the publication of the Scarlet and Black books, archival materials documenting African American history at Rutgers from slavery to the twentieth century have been compiled and published in the Scarlet and Black Digital Archive, curated by Dr. Jesse Bayker. In the course of this research, the Scarlet and Black team learned that Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives hold a treasure trove of documents that illuminate the history of slavery in Middlesex County beyond the walls of the university. These documents describe hundreds of events in the lives of enslaved people who lived in surrounding communities. Dr. Bayker began compiling a dataset of names and events related to these archival records. From this original dataset, Dr. Bayker began developing a digital project to create a searchable database of slavery-era records that would reach beyond Rutgers. From 2021 to 2024, Dr. Bayker worked on developing the New Jersey Slavery Records dabatase while serving as the digital archivist at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. A team of undergraduate and graduate students at the institute assisted with transcribing sources, collecting data, and digitizing archival documents to expand the database.

New Orleans Slave Sale Data, 1856 - 1861

North American Slave Narratives

From Documenting the American South.