More than 22,000 formerly enslaved people are found in records from Columbus that were released in a new project from Ancestry, one of the world’s largest genealogy companies.
Ancestry released a collection of nearly 38,000 articles involving enslaved people from 1788 to 1867, providing free information about more than 183,000 people who were enslaved. The collection is called “Articles of Enslavement.”
Nicka Sewell-Smith, a genealogist and senior story producer at Ancestry, said staff built an AI model to index newspaper articles that mentioned people involved in slavery, including formerly enslaved people and slave traders.
“With this collection, it brings you back local,” she said. “One of the things that stands out for me is definitely the breadth of what’s there.”
The articles provide thousands of records on a local level, but Sewell-Smith said the collection’s greatest achievement is its national reach.
“It helps to centralize this information on a national scale, which is important because of the nature of enslavement,” she said. “Sometimes people come into Georgia, they set up, then they might leave and move to Mississippi or Louisiana or Texas. When you’re researching enslavers or the enslaved, you have to factor in all those different locations.”
The collection also provides insight on freedom seekers, a group of people whose whole purpose was to preserve secrecy.
“We hear about freedom seekers all the time, but one of the hardest things to do is research if your person was part of that because there is no encyclopedia of the Underground Railroad,” Sewell-Smith said.
Sewell-Smith reviewed the records of countless freedom seekers, including a jail announcement from Natchez, Mississippi.
“It shows all these people in jail who had run away from all these different places, some from two or three states away, and they’re all in jail in Natchez,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, why would I even know to look in the paper in Natchez for somebody who ran away from North Carolina?’ It doesn’t make sense, but that’s one of the things that this collection illuminates.”
Other people who can benefit the most from the records in the collection are those who can no longer use official records, like court documents.
“Some individuals are dealing with courthouse destruction, like a courthouse burning down during the Civil War or afterwards,” she said. “They’re at a loss for trying to research their ancestors. The deeds, the mortgages, the wills, everything went up in flames… In this collection, we’re bringing them the information they thought they lost completely.”
Despite the joy and relief people can feel when they discover a new piece of their lineage, Sewell-Smith said there is often anger and sadness alongside it. She explained her reaction when she reviewed an auction advertisement published in the Weekly Columbus Enquirer in 1854.
“It doesn’t even name the enslaved people,” she said. “It just says that there are 75 of them being auctioned off along with things like cattle and sheep and mules. We couldn’t even give the dignity of the 75 people to name them?”
Sewell-Smith said the collection’s value lies in the formerly enslaved people it aims to center.
“What’s super important is that they’re not a footnote in this collection,” she said. “With these articles, we have the opportunity to lean into the lives of our ancestors and learn all we can.”
The records can be found at www.Ancestry.com/Articles-of-Enslavement.
This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with the Ledger-Inquirer.
