Mapping The Timeline of Enslavement

What made you get started on this project?

After going through my personal health crisis (see the Brain Blog), I needed to reroute my career into something more sustainable to my energy levels and more aligned with my personal interests (historical research). Before taking on this project, I spent about five years working at Coggeshall Farm Museum in Bristol, Rhode Island. There, I explored and taught the ideas of complicity in relation to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. From my experience, I believe that Bristol’s deeply rooted role in the enslavement of people is a subject that is often misinformed or not spoken of to the extent it should be. By creating a new research tool, I hope to inform more people in a new way about Bristol’s past.

How do you determine where someone who was enslaved lived?

There is very little record of where those enslaved in Bristol were living. What records we do have are from Wills and Inventories. Some records show us that enslaved people were living in stables or garrets. Other research, specifically noted in the article “‘Appropriated to the Use of the Colored People’: Urban Slave Housing in the North” by John Michael Vlach, indicated enslavers would keep their enslaved within close proximity to their homes for surveillance. 

As such, those who are placed on this Google Earth map are placed with the idea that they were living either in their enslaver’s home or within view of it.

What sources do you use to determine where in Bristol someone is enslaved?

My work started with a map known as The Woodbury Map. Created by Samuel Woodbury in 1690, this map shows the property boundaries of Bristol’s first colonial settlers. It is a fantastic starting point for this project, and allowed me to place most of the people from 1680-1730. For more complicated entries, and entries past 1730, I use wills, inventories, and property transfers to locate where an enslaver most likely was in town, and therefore where those they enslaved would be located.