Michigan State University’s “Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade” website, or Enslaved.org, is a project, in partnership with other organizations, that documents the lives of named enslaved individuals of African descent. The project has published its latest data, making information regarding two million named Black Americans born before emancipation in the 1900 census available for discovery and download.

The team of scholars includes FamilySearch International, a nonprofit genealogical resource that helps people discover their family history, Brigham Young University and other organizations. The expanded dataset will significantly enhance the discoverability of formerly enslaved individuals and their families for academic research purposes.

After initial MSU-FamilySearch meetings in 2018 and several collaboration pilots, the team determined that the 1900 U.S. census was a valuable collection. In recent years, FamilySearch and BYU worked together to identify about 2 million named people in this collection who were born before emancipation in the United States, enslaved and free Blacks, along with links to original census images and Family Tree records. They have assembled information about these individuals into a searchable dataset and written an essay about the team’s methodology and conclusions from the data for Enslaved.org’s Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation.