The ESSSS Project [Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies]

The ESSSS project was created by Vanderbilt University to preserve and digitize Catholic Archival records relating to Africans and their New world descendants in the former Spanish colonies of Brazil, Florida, Cuba and Columbia. The oldest Catholic registers began in the 16th century and continue to the early 1900s.  These ecclesiastical entries include baptisms, burials and marriages of slaves and free persons of color from the beginning of colonization. Catholic registers are valuable to genealogists because they allow you to reconstruct several generations. The ESSSS project is also of historical importance in that details are provided about the lives of African slaves and their descendants in the Latin colonies of the Western Hemisphere. The ESSSS project can be assessed at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/esss/

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Baptism of a Cuban slave