Thank you for coming!

Please allow me to introduce myself.

My name is Jennie K. Williams. Here’s where I’ve been and where I’m headed next.

I built the largest database of the domestic slave trade, Oceans of Kinfolk.

Oceans of Kinfolk includes the names of more than 63,000 enslaved men, women and children who were trafficked to New Orleans, the nation’s largest market for buying and selling enslaved human beings, from elsewhere in the United States between 1818 and 1860. It is based on information I gathered from tens of thousands of ship manifests.

My book, Oceans of Kinfolk: The Coastwise Traffic of Enslaved Ancestors to New Orleans, 1820-1860, is forthcoming from UNC Press.

As documented by the Oceans of Kinfolk database, enslavers trafficked more than 63,000 enslaved persons to New Orleans, the nation’s largest slave market, in the forty years before the Civil War. Most came from families that had been enslaved in Virginia and Maryland for generations: American ancestries that predated the nation itself. This traffic, as well as the broader domestic slave trade, I argue, wrought havoc not only on individual lives, but on entire networks of kin and community.

Oceans of Kinfolk presents the first comprehensive account of the antebellum coastwise traffic and of the systematic violence inflicted upon African American families through the entire domestic slave trade. Ultimately, however, Oceans of Kinfolk is a book about kinship and its spectacular persistence across space and time.

I am also the Co-Founder, along with Eola Lewis Dance, of Kinfolkology.

Kinfolkology is an open archive, database collective, and collaborative community dedicated to remembering enslaved people as kin and kindred in full partnership with Descendant communities.

Okay, but now what?

I’ll show you now what. Click here, please.