Beginnings

The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies), directed by Jane Landers at Vanderbilt University, was launched in 2003 with an Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to Landers and her co-directors, Mariza de Carvalho Soares of the Universidade Federal Fluminense (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Paul E. Lovejoy of York University (Toronto, Canada). During almost three years of intensive work in Cuba and Brazil, Slave Societies teams digitally preserved ecclesiastical records for more than 750,000 individuals. The largest number of those were Africans and their descendants, but Europeans, Indigenous, and Chinese individuals are also recorded.

The SSDA’s largest and oldest collections were generated by the Catholic Church, which mandated the baptism of African slaves in the fifteenth century and later extended this requirement to the Iberian New World. The baptismal records preserved in Slave Societies are the oldest and most uniform serial data available for the history of Africans in the Atlantic World and offer the most extensive information regarding their ethnic origins. Once baptized, Africans and their descendants were eligible for the sacraments of Christian marriage and burial, adding to their historical record. Through membership in the Catholic Church families also generated a host of other religious documentation such as confirmations, petitions to wed, wills, and even annulments. In addition, Africans and their descendants joined church brotherhoods organized along ethnic lines, through which they recorded not only ceremonial and religious aspects of their lives but their social, political, and economic networks as well. Africans and their descendants also left a documentary trail in municipal and provincial archives across the Atlantic World. These secular records, which Slave Societies is also preserving, include bills of sale, property registries and disputes, dowries, and letters of manumission, among many other types of records. Unfortunately, many of these historical documents are at risk. Some materials preserved by SSDA teams have since suffered significant damage; others no longer exist except in digital form. The goal of Slave Societies is to preserve as many of these unique documents as possible and make them freely available to the world so that current and future generations can continue to learn about the history of Africans and their descendants in the Atlantic World.

Additional Growth

The Historic St. Augustine Research Institute funded further digitization work in Matanzas and Ceiba Mocha, Cuba in 2014. At the later location, SSDA teams preserved the ecclesiastical records for San Augustín de la Nueva Florida, established by Floridanos exiled to Cuba when the British gained control of Florida in 1763. Subsequent awards from the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation have supported the establishment of a permanent office for the Slave Societies Digital Archive, doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships dedicated to the project, and necessary technological upgrades.