Between the 16th and 19th centuries, approximately 12.5 million African people were enslaved, forced onto ships and trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean to be enslaved in the Americas.
Known today as the Transatlantic Slave Trade, it was one of the largest forced migrations in history. Only a small fraction of those individuals have been documented; their stories — their identities — lost to time.
Susquehanna University history students, under the guidance of Mégane Coulon, assistant professor of African history, are creating biographies for people who were born free in Africa and later enslaved. After being forced onto slave ships and taken across the ocean toward plantations in the Caribbean, North America or Brazil, they were intercepted by the British Royal Navy and forcibly relocated to the colony of Sierra Leone.
“When you study the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Coulon said, “it’s a lot about numbers. We know the scope of the event, but we know much less about individual experiences.”
Through digitized sources, students seek to identify a minimum of five facts about a person to draft a biography.
“It feels like putting a puzzle together — even if it’s sometimes frustrating dealing with missing or incomplete information,” said Mary Jackson ’28, of Millersburg, Pennsylvania. “I enjoy the research because it’s fulfilling to put the pieces together and understand what happened to these people.”
The work is part of the larger Freedom Narratives project, which uses an online digital repository of autobiographical testimonies and biographical data of Atlantic Africans to determine their place of origin, why they were enslaved and what happened to them. Researchers from around the world are participating in the grant-funded work. The project is directed by Erika Melek Delgado and Paul Lovejoy and is a result of a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant awarded to them in 2019. In 2020, the project migrated to Regenerated Identities, a network of digital humanities projects developed and supported by WalkWithWeb.org, an international operating consortium that supports social science and humanities research under the leadership of CEO Kartikay Chadha.
“I find it challenging to look at these people’s ages and see how young they were when they were going through all of these hardships,” said Madysyn Nolter ’28, of Coal Township, Pennsylvania. “It was extremely disheartening to see the harsh treatment inflicted on all of these people, especially those who were quite young.”
According to Jackson, reading and understanding the source documents can be difficult because of the handwriting or unclear terminology. But other challenges are more complicated than interpreting handwriting, Coulon said.
“In my classes we talk about Western assumptions because it’s so easy to analyze this through a Western perspective,” Coulon said. “We have to step away from those preconceived notions.”
Jack Thon ’26, a history–secondary education major from Owings, Maryland, participated in the Freedom Narratives project last year, reconstructing the life of Farlulu, a Liberated African redirected from Sierra Leone to the Gambia.
“However, before he even gets to Sierra Leone, he was enslaved by someone, though we do not know by whom, branded and somehow ended up on a slave ship in the port of Ouidah, which is in modern-day Benin,” Thon explained.
Thon also found that Farlulu likely contracted smallpox between Ouidah and Sierra Leone, drawing primarily from the Registers of Liberated Africans despite gaps in the historical record.
“This adds to the importance; so many families never heard about the people taken from them at an early age,” Thon said. “If I could explain what these people went through and bring some depth to this complex issue, even a little bit, I am satisfied.”
He credits Mégane Coulon, assistant professor of African history, with shaping his approach to interpreting those records.
“It is easy to take the notes of the clerk at face value, but Dr. Coulon showed me that the real work comes from your own interpretation and critical thinking,” he said.
The project also revealed how few scholars focus on this history. One, Kyle Prochnow of Ursinus College, informed Thon’s research.
“But I did not want to simply restate his ideas,” Thon said. “I wanted to focus more on the lived stories of the Liberated Africans in the Gambia. It was tough to do, but incredibly important. For their whole lives, these people were considered numbers or property or something sub-human. I felt obligated to tell their story as best I could.
“So many scholars who focus on enslaved African people or even Liberated Africans glance over the Gambia, but that then leaves out over 3,000 people who went through hell. That is why the research is so important.”
It’s a message that has landed with Gabriel Johnson ’28, of Lebanon, Pennsylvania.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned is the need to take a wider perspective when looking at history,” Johnson said. “These documents and databases don’t just show a list of people; they show how the author viewed the situation at hand and how his or her society viewed slavery at large.”
To date, the Freedom Narratives project has compiled enough research to draft profiles of nearly 4,000 individuals — an impressive figure that still only hints at the vast number of lives impacted by the reach of colonialism.
“This is a project that makes me emotional,” Coulon said. “This is not just history for the sake of doing history — it’s something that makes a difference.”
