Freedom on the Move is a “database of fugitives from North American slavery.” A digital archive, the site holds a repository of runaway slave advertisements posted by enslavers and jailers in newspapers from across the North and South. The database is incredibly large, with at least 32,254 advertisements digitized currently.

Documenting the Early History of Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley is a community based research project that is documenting the lives of free, enslaved and formerly enslaved Black residents of the Connecticut River Valley prior to 1900. The project is compiling narratives of people’s lives using the information found. 

Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org) is a “discovery hub” that allows users to search and find information from a large number of datasets and digital projects relating to the historical slave trade.

List of Known Enslaved People in Boston is a publicly available list of known enslaved people in Boston created as a part of the Slavery in Boston exhibit in Faneuil Hall. The City of Boston discusses the data in more depth here.

Further Reading

Hardesty, Jared Ross. Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth Century Boston. NYU Press, 2016.

Herndon, Ruth Wallis, and Murray, John E., eds. Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America. Cornell University Press, 2009.

Steele, Catherine Knight; Lu, Jessica H. and Winstead, Kevin C. Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality. Routledge, 2023.