About

About the Jamaican Slave Names Project

This database arises from a research project on patterns of naming in 18th-century Jamaica. Some conclusions from that research are discussed in Margaret Williamson, “Africa or Old Rome? Jamaican Slave Naming Revisited,” Slavery and Abolition 38.1 (2017): 117-34. Like previous work in the field (see Sources), this study relies on archival sources, many of which are not easily accessible. In choosing inventories for inclusion here, preference has been given to those not yet available through digitized collections. A second aim has been to open up to scrutiny the analytic classifications (Name Types) used.

History of the Project

This website was initiated during a Dartmouth College Digital Humanities Summer Residency in 2016, funded by Dartmouth Information Technology Services and the Dartmouth College Library.  The Project Team consisted of:

• Laura Braunstein, Digital Humanities Librarian
• Hazel-Dawn Dumpert (Editor)
• Scott Millspaugh, Instructional Designer (Project Manager)
• John Wallace, Research Computing
• Margaret Williamson, Associate Professor Emerita of Classics and of Comparative Literature (Principal Investigator)

It was completed with the invaluable assistance of John P. Bell, Director of Dartmouth’s Data Experiences and Visualizations Studio, and the final editing was supported in 2019 by a grant from the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College.

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to many others in the Dartmouth community for their support and assistance, especially to Daniel Rockmore, Director of the Neukom Institute, and to Mark Boettcher and Richard Brittain in Research Computing.

Keith McClelland, Digital Humanities Specialist at the Legacies of British Slaveownership Project, provided helpful advice throughout.

Many librarians and archivists assisted with locating the material, including members of the staff at: the Dartmouth College Library; the British Library; the Huntington Library; the Bristol Record Office; Special Collections, University of Exeter; and especially Derbyshire County Archive, Matlock, Derbyshire, UK.

Licensing

Unless otherwise stated, all data is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0).