St Helena: Slaves and Owners

http://www.fosh.org.uk/

Friends of St Helena is a charitable Society that has several aims, one of which is to provide information about St Helena and its two sister islands, Ascension and Tristan Da Cunha.

Of specific interest to anyone tracing their ancestry to St Helena, this Society has just published a full list of over 700 slaves emancipated from the year 1827, together with a list of nearly 200 owners. www.fosh.org.uk/index.php?id=23.

The St Helena government effectively loaned a sum of money to each slave to buy their freedom, and then required that sum to be paid back over the next few decades.

A considerable amount of additional information is available to members of the Society, which anyone can join for a nominal sum, this being the Society's only source of funding. This additional information comes from reports generated by the St Helena Government to track the sums owed by slaves and includes their age, value, skills, family relationship and comments on their character.


Over and above that, the Society publishes a magazine called Wirebird with a number of articles on St Helena. A detailed index of all 39 editions published since 1990 is available to anyone visiting the web site, and members can upload full copies of any of these editions as Acrobat files.

The above information was provided by Ian Bruce (Membership Secretary and Webmaster, FoSH).