The Witness Stones Project is proud to join the Atlantic Black Box Project, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Monmouth University as an organizational member of the Northeast Slavery Records Collaborative.
The Northeast Slavery Records Collaborative (NSRC) develops and maintains an online searchable compilation of records, called the Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI). The NESRI identifies records of enslavement, including records that identify individual enslaved persons and enslavers, for the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Jersey.
NESRI will index 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 participating 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.
