UCL History Secures $575k Grant for Caribbean Enslaved People Database

UCL History congratulates Professor Matthew J. Smith and the UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery (CSLBS) on the award of a $575,000 grant from a North American funder to support the development of a database of enslaved people in the British Caribbean.

The award will fund Valuable Lives (VL), the Centre’s core research project, which aims to build a publicly accessible database listing every person enslaved in the British Caribbean between 1817 and 1832. 

Led by Professor Matthew J. Smith (Principal Investigator) and Dr Matthew Stallard (Research Lead), the VL project will draw upon the Registers of Returns of Enslaved Persons (1817–1832) held at The National Archives, which constitutes the largest and most systematic set of records of enslaved people in the British Caribbean. 

“Valuable Lives will transform how we research, teach and speak about slavery by placing enslaved men, women and children at the centre of the historical record,” said Professor Smith.  

“By drawing on digitised and indexed records to build a publicly accessible database, we are creating a resource for descendant communities around the world, restoring lineage, histories and kinships long lost due to slavery.’’ 

Originally created as a surveillance tool to monitor enslaved people as “property”, the Registers of Returns include names, ages, places of birth (African or Creole), maternal relationships, and records of births and deaths. 

Subverting the original purpose of these records, the CSLBS team will use cutting-edge digital methods to reconstruct individual and community biographies through advanced data matching, mapping tools, and linked archival research. Beginning with those in Jamaica (which held more than half the total number of Africans transported to the region under British rule), the database will ultimately contain details of nearly 400,000 people. 

VL will connect enslaved individuals to plantations, enslavers, parishes and, where possible, to descendants and later migration patterns across the Caribbean, the UK and the United States.

Dr. Antonio Sennis, Head of the History Department, congratulated the UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery for this important research project that “reshapes both our understanding of the past and our responsibility to it.”

“I am delighted to mark this achievement by Professor Matthew J. Smith, Dr Matthew Stallard, and all colleagues at the UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. Valuable Lives exemplifies scholarship of the highest order: conceptually ambitious, methodologically innovative and of profound significance. We are deeply grateful for the support that will make this work possible. By restoring names, relationships and histories to those whom the archive rendered as property, this project reshapes both our understanding of the past and our responsibility to it. It also reminds us, with particular clarity, that historical knowledge is not merely retrospective: it sharpens our understanding of the present and enlarges our capacity to act within it. It stands as a powerful expression of what a Department of History can and should do at its best: to produce knowledge that is intellectually exacting in its standards, genuinely transformative in its reach and ethically rigorous in its attention to human lives.”

The power of partnerships  

VL exemplifies a commitment to transformative scholarship and public-facing research that reshapes understanding of the past and its contemporary implications, combining research with digital methods to recover and make publicly accessible the lives of enslaved people whose stories have been forgotten.  

The project is being delivered in partnership with The National Archives and Ancestry, the global leader in family history. Ancestry is a genealogy platform that provides tools for family and lineage research. It will provide fully transcribed and digitised indexes of the registers to the CSLBS team on a phased schedule and will launch a free, publicly accessible database of the records on its platform in September 2026. 

“Ancestry is committed to preserving culturally significant history that is at risk of being lost or forgotten and making it accessible to everyone at no cost. As part of this commitment, we are proud to partner with The National Archives and UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery to preserve, digitize and transcribe important historical records that can help millions of descendants of the enslaved uncover meaningful insights into their family histories,” said Quinton Atkinson, Senior Director of Global Content Acquisition at Ancestry. 

Community engagement and global impact 

The project team has already piloted its methodology in Port Royal parish, Jamaica, combining register data with plantation surveys, historical maps and visual materials. Early community engagement has demonstrated the project’s emotional and scholarly impact: in one instance, a Jamaican farmer reviewing a reconstructed family tree identified previously unknown African ancestors in the registers. 

Over the three-year grant period, the project will progress from data processing and database construction to public rollout. Plans include a formal launch at UCL, workshops in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool, events in Jamaica in collaboration with the National Library and Museum of Jamaica, and engagement with US-based partners and academic associations. 

“This award is testament to the transformative work happening at the CSLBS,” said Angharad Milenkovic, Vice-President (Advancement) at UCL.  

“VL will impact lives far beyond academia by creating an enduring resource for families, communities and educators and as a result will address historical injustices and silence to help foster an inclusive understanding of the past. We are very grateful to have received such generous support for this important work.”  

Further links 

CSLBS
The National Archives
Ancestry