ITSS Team Finishes Data Entry for Marronage Database
The IN THE SAME SEA team has finished data entry for our runaway slave database! We started with an unnamed man jailed as runaway advertised in the Antigua Gazette from 1776, and ended with Sophie in the Journal Politique et Commercial de la Pointe-à-Pitre (Guadeloupe) from 1826.
Antigua Gazette, 8th May 1776, available from Caribbean Newspapers Series 1 on Readex.
Journal Politique et Commercial de la Pointe-à-Pitre, 2nd February 1826, available from Gallica.
We have found 7,007 enslaved individuals who fled their bondage listed in newspapers from the Lesser Antilles. Our entries include individual advertisements placed by enslavers or plantation managers, jail lists, and lists of those captured by Rangers. We have noted what island people fled from and where they absconded to (if we know), whether they fled across the sea or participated in maritime activities, their gender, and whether they were alone or absconded as part of a group. Next, we will check our entries for errors and decide on additional database attributes. The advertisements span more than 50 years and cover nearly 50 newspapers. Multiple people have worked on the database over the last two years, so this has truly been a team effort. We want to make the database as useful as possible not only for ourselves, but also for others. We look forward to sharing it with you in the future!