California Slavery Era Insurance Registry

California’s Slavery Era Insurance Registry is a dataset of 677 records of life insurance policies on enslaved people in Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, whose lives enslavers insured through companies (or successor firms), still doing business in California in 2000. The same year, California passed a public disclosure law, SB2199 Sec. 1(a). The law requires insurance companies doing business in California to research their archives and submit a report on any policies that company or a predecessor firm issued on enslaved lives and to include any other relevant information on insurance policies on enslaved people known or suspected by that firm. The California Department of insurance collated the reports submitted by the various companies into a single table, publicly available on its website at a PDF. To make the registry more usable, Enslaved.org project staff converted the PDF table made public by the state into a .csv spreadsheet, available here.