Our largest database lists approximately 15,000 African-American immigrants to Liberia, 1820-1904.

In addition to full names, it includes, where available, information on family position, sex, education, legal status prior to emigration, manumitter, town or county of origin, ship on which they travelled, month and year of voyage and destination in Liberia.

The rich details provided here counter the stereotypical image of Liberian repatriates as elite mimics of Euro-American heritage.  In contrast, hundreds of them were born in Africa or bore African names. Many others had purchased themselves and immediate relatives, at the cost of hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars, prior to immigration.

This database should prove useful to genealogists, both in the United States and Liberia. It will also be of interest to a variety of scholars:

1. *specialists in social, nineteenth-century and African-American history
   

2. *geographers, especially those interested in migrations
   

3. *sociologists concerned with family patterns
   

Although I have been working toward making this list publicly accessible for many years, the project limped along slowly due to a lack of resources. The pace quickly over the last few years, thanks to research funding and clerical support I received from Penn State Harrisburg.

In deed, typing and proofreading thousands of lines of fine print were difficult tasks, but even more challenging aspect of this project was finding the right software application for publishing the data in a form that is accessible to non-scholars, which required me to learn more about databases, computer languages, coding and scripting than I cared to.

After exploring the use of Filemaker Pro, Microsoft Access and various other applications, a breakthrough finally came when I stumbled upon a genealogical website building tool called The Next Generation (TNG).  This cool yet powerful software provides an array of useful functions, including links to Google Maps and the ability to enlarge images and genealogical links by merely hovering over them.

A major feature of this site is the ability to show relationships between persons, places and other entires. Clicking on a place name, for example, brings a list of all persons linked to that location. Or, searching in the religion field produces a list of all persons with a documented church affiliation. Similarly, the Statistics page keeps a running total of persons by gender.

Please note that some items on the Search Page have three search fields: “Fact,” “Place” and “Year.” Put your search term in the “Place” field only when looking in the entries labeled “City/County of Origin,” “Destination,” “Places Visited,” and “Residence.” For all others, place your search term in the “Fact” field.

To visit the repatriates database, click here. After visiting, please sign our guestbook.