Researchers open online database showing journeys of 12.5 million slaves

ATLANTA-In a major advance in genealogical research, African-Americans will be able to trace the routes of slave ships that transported 12.5 million of their ancestors from Africa as early as the 16th Century.

The free Internet database gives African-Americans the opportunity for the first time to explore their African heritage the way whites have long been able to chart their migration from Europe.

Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is the result of 40 years of research by hundreds of scholars. Two years ago, Emory University researchers, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, began compiling maps, images and other records of about 35,000 slave-trade voyages from Africa to North America, Brazil, the Caribbean and Europe. It is the first time such a large amount of data on the subject has been available to the public.

"Everybody wants to know where they came from, and for people from Europe, it has been possible for several centuries now to trace migrant communities," said David Eltis, a history professor at Emory and a director of the project. "Now it is possible to do the same for people of African descent.

"The records for people of Africa and the Americas are better than the records of connections between Europe and the Americas for the simple reason that slaves were property," he said. "No one cared what happened to free migrants. They did care what happened to slaves, because they were making money from them."

While the database can establish the regions slave ships launched from in Africa and where they arrived in the United States, it generally is impossible to determine which ancestors were on board, researchers said, because the records have African names that were changed when the slaves arrived in North America.

"The data certainly is not going to be helpful in tracing individual ancestors. You can't say your ancestor came on this vessel, except in a tiny handful of cases," Eltis said. "What it can do is provide context. The big advantage is that it establishes connections between parts of Africa and parts of the Americas."

African-Americans have had a fascination with discovering their African heritage since the miniseries "Roots," based on the Alex Haley novel, was televised in 1977. Since 2003, a Washington, D.C., company called African Ancestry Inc. has offered mail-order DNA tests for $349. In recent years, other DNA research projects have been developed, attracting such celebrity clients as Oprah Winfrey, Spike Lee and civil rights icon Andrew Young.

The problem with DNA testing, according to researchers, is that insufficient samples of DNA have been collected from Africa, making it difficult to provide matches from many parts of the continent. The Voyages database will help reinforce DNA data, researchers said.

"People may not be able to trace their particular ancestor, but it is the most complete accounting of individual lives, individual ships, individual journeys to date," said Leslie Harris, an Emory genealogist and author of "In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863."

It is more difficult for African-Americans in Illinois to use the database because many of their families traveled North in the Great Migration from 1916 to 1930. To find those records, Illinois residents would have to know where in the South their ancestors were enslaved.

"During the slave trade, we don't have people who were dropped off in Illinois. The ships landed on the East Coast," Harris said. "So we are talking about people who started out on the East Coast and then, one way or another, ended up in Illinois, not necessarily as enslaved people but as free people."

The database, which is expected to become a classroom tool, contains the records of 10.5 million slaves, more than 85 percent of the slave trade. It identifies more than 67,000 of them by their African name, age, sex, origin and place of embarkation.

Though many Americans view slavery as a U.S. phenomenon, the United States represented only 4 percent of the slave trade, far behind Brazil, the leader, which imported about 45 percent of the slaves, Eltis said.

"During the time the slave trade was at its peak, it was considered to be an ordinary business, not something immoral. Slave ship owners used to name their voyages after their family members," Eltis said.

"So the difference between attitudes then and now is quite considerable."

 

 

By Bob Herbert

Columnist

© New York Times

December 30, 2008

Does anyone know where George W. Bush is?

You don't hear much from him anymore. The last image most of us remember is of the president ducking a pair of size 10s that were hurled at him in Baghdad.

We're still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel is thrashing the Palestinians in Gaza. And the U.S. economy is about as vibrant as the 0-16 Detroit Lions.

But hardly a peep have we heard from George, the 43rd.

When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don't think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry - a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches - over the damage he's done to this country.

This is the man who gave us the war in Iraq and Guantánamo and torture and rendition; who turned the Clinton economy and the budget surplus into fool's gold; who dithered while New Orleans drowned; who trampled our civil liberties at home and ruined our reputation abroad; who let Dick Cheney run hog wild and thought Brownie was doing a heckuva job.

The Bush administration specialized in deceit. How else could you get the public (and a feckless Congress) to go along with an invasion of Iraq as an absolutely essential response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when Iraq had had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?

Exploiting the public's understandable fears, Mr. Bush made it sound as if Iraq was about to nuke us: "We cannot wait," he said, "for the final proof - the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

He then set the blaze that has continued to rage for nearly six years, consuming more than 4,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. (A car bomb over the weekend killed two dozen more Iraqis, many of them religious pilgrims.) The financial cost to the U.S. will eventually reach $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.

A year into the war Mr. Bush was cracking jokes about it at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association. He displayed a series of photos that showed him searching the Oval Office, peering behind curtains and looking under the furniture. A mock caption had Mr. Bush saying: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere."

And then there's the Bush economy, another disaster, a trapdoor through which middle-class Americans can plunge toward the bracing experiences normally reserved for the poor and the destitute.

Mr. Bush traveled the country in the early days of his presidency, promoting his tax cut plans as hugely beneficial to small-business people and families of modest means. This was more deceit. The tax cuts would go overwhelmingly to the very rich.

The president would give the wealthy and the powerful virtually everything they wanted. He would throw sand into the regulatory apparatus and help foster the most extreme income disparities since the years leading up to the Great Depression. Once again he was lighting a fire. This time the flames would engulf the economy and, as with Iraq, bring catastrophe.

If the U.S. were a product line, it would be seen now as deeply damaged goods, subject to recall.

There seemed to be no end to Mr. Bush's talent for destruction. He tried to hand the piggy bank known as Social Security over to the marauders of the financial sector, but saner heads prevailed.

In New Orleans, the president failed to intervene swiftly and decisively to aid the tens of thousands of poor people who were very publicly suffering and, in many cases, dying. He then compounded this colossal failure of leadership by traveling to New Orleans and promising, in a dramatic, floodlit appearance, to spare no effort in rebuilding the flood-torn region and the wrecked lives of the victims.

He went further, vowing to confront the issue of poverty in America "with bold action."

It was all nonsense, of course. He did nothing of the kind.

The catalog of his transgressions against the nation's interests - sins of commission and omission - would keep Mr. Bush in a confessional for the rest of his life. Don't hold your breath. He's hardly the contrite sort.

He told ABC's Charlie Gibson: "I don't spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don't worry about long-term history, either, since I'm not going to be around to read it."

The president chuckled, thinking - as he did when he made his jokes about the missing weapons of mass destruction - that there was something funny going on.

 

 

January 13-16, 2009

Wall Street Project

New York, N.Y.

 

February 6-8, 2009

Anchorage, Alaska

 

April 25, 2009

Barber-Scotia College National Alumni Association

Concord, N.C.

 

May 8-9, 2009

Knoxville College Board of Trustees

Knoxville, Tenn.

 

June 4-7, 2009

Urban Financial Services Coalition

Dearborn, Mich.

 

June 10-14, 2009

100 Black Men of America

New York, N.Y.

 

June 21, 2009

Old Storm Branch Baptist Church

North Augusta, S.C.

 

June 24-27, 2009

The PowerNetworking Conference

Atlanta, Ga.

 

July 18-21, 2009

National Speakers Association Convention

Phoenix, Ariz.

 

August 6-9, 2009

National Association of Black Journalists

Tampa, Fla.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let Curry Spice Up Your Next Event 

 

 "This whopper of an anthology perfectly captures black life and culture...This retrospective volume is journalism at its best: probing, controversial and serious...Although Emerge was devoted unequivocally to African-Americans, Curry's vision and editorship of this book will instruct, provoke and sometimes entertain or inspire any reader."
- Publishers Weekly

 

 The Affirmative Action Debate
Edited by George E. Curry

"... Collects the leading voices on all sides of this crucial dialogue...the one book you need to understand and discuss the nation's sharpest political divide."