Northeast Slavery Record Index

The Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI) is an online searchable compilation of records that identify individual enslaved persons and enslavers in the states of New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Click below to see our complete collections for each state:

New York – Maine – New Hampshire – Vermont – Massachusetts – Rhode Island – Connecticut – New Jersey – Pennsylvania

Seal of the Dominion of New England (1686)

NESRI indexes census records, slave trade transactions, cemetery records, birth certifications, manumissions, ship inventories, newspaper accounts, private narratives, legal documents and many other sources. The goal is to deepen the understanding of slavery in the northeast United States by bringing together information that until now has been largely disconnected and difficult to access. This allows for searches that combine records from all indexed sources based on parameters such as the name of an owner, a place name, and date ranges.

NESRI also serves communities seeking to understand their histories of enslavement. Our Community-Locality Reports present enslavement records for a state, county, town or city. While our collection of records is never complete and always growing, our customized report provides a head start in the local research process, identifying records that might otherwise take months or years to locate.

Artificial Intelligence and Slavery Research

by Ned Benton, Co-Director, Northeast Slavery Records Index
June 2023

Can artificial intelligence (AI) locate and assemble fragments of information about an enslaved person and present them in an accurate and coherent narrative? We formulated seven prompts (AI search questions) asking about five specific enslaved people and two localities for which there is significant documentation from the Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI) and other internet sources. We submitted the prompts to three AI programs, ChatGTP, Microsoft Bing and Google Bard, and compared the results to descriptions readily available elsewhere. The AI responses ranged from hesitant incompetence to assertive mendacity.

Slavery and Universities, Colleges and Schools

Note: This project is ongoing. This article and the associated report will be updated as the project research continues.

Colonial campuses in the northeast have studied their histories of slavery, but generally their focus has been on founders, donors, staff and faculty, not students. However, when campus officials and faculty members model and normalize slavery, this sends an important educational message to students, who as alumni bring these values and norms to their future home communities. In this way, slavery on campus promotes slavery in distant communities. This is particularly true when the campuses are educating future ministers and religious leaders, who graduate and then model and espouse slavery to their future congregations and communities.

This project seeks to document this process, identifying graduates of northeast colonial universities where slavery was practiced, who went on to practice slavery after graduation.

The Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI), having indexed many records of enslavement across the northeast, has begun to match slavery records with officials and students of universities and colleges, and developing online reports of the records we index. We include local records of enslavement by college officials and regional records by graduates in their home communities.

Select from among the colleges where we have initiated indexing of records and NESRI will generate a report.

The remainder of this article describes our methods, limitations and general findings.