Prosopography

Marronnage (Fugitive Advertisements)

The largest set of records comes from marronnage.info, a database created by historian Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec documenting fugitive slave advertisements published in Saint-Domingue newspapers between 1766 and 1790. These advertisements were placed by enslavers seeking the return of people who had escaped bondage.

CNRS Indemnites (1825 Colonist Claims)

28,000+ records of French colonists who filed indemnity claims after Haiti's independence. Drawn from the CNRS Esclavage & Indemnites database. These records document the enslavers' side — property types, amounts received, and locations — providing a counterpoint to the enslaved persons in the marronnage data.

Enslaved.org (Linked Open Data)

~770 named individuals from Enslaved.org, a collaborative linked open data hub aggregating records of historically enslaved people from multiple scholarly databases. These records often include occupations, complexion descriptions, and social status information not found in other sources.

What the Records Contain

Each advertisement may include a name, age, physical description, ethnic origin, skills, branding marks, clothing description, and spoken languages — whatever the enslaver chose to report and however they chose to categorize the person. These records survive because enslavers needed to identify the people who had freed themselves; they were not created to honor or document those individuals.

The Enslaver's Perspective

These documents were produced by the enslaving class. Names recorded may be imposed colonial names rather than self-chosen names. Physical descriptions use colonial-era language reflecting the dehumanizing logic of the slave system. Researchers should approach this data critically.

"Nation" Terminology & African Origins

Origins such as "Congo," "Ibo," "Nago," and "Arada" are 18th-century colonial categorizations of African ethnic and geographic groups. They are imprecise and reflect European perceptions, not necessarily the identities the people themselves held. These terms are preserved as they appear in the historical record and should not be mapped directly onto modern ethnic or national identities. Hover over origin terms in the charts and table below for historical context.

Data Processing

Records were extracted via NLP and regular expressions from JSON exports of the source databases. Entity resolution was applied to link records that likely refer to the same individual (shown as "linked records" on person pages). Confidence scores reflect extraction reliability — lower scores indicate more uncertain data.

Limitations

This database does not represent all persons in colonial Saint-Domingue. Marronnage records cover only those who escaped and were advertised for. Indemnity records cover only claimants in the 1825 settlement. Age estimates are approximate. Many records are incomplete. The absence of a person here does not mean they did not exist.

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