Manumissions of Enslaved Persons Recorded in Registers of Deeds in Montserrat National Trust Archives

The Register of Deeds in the British West Indian colonies was the fundamental and definitive record of all legal documents pertaining to property–real estate, personal possessions, and chattels, which included enslaved people. Laboriously transcribed from the originals, they served (and do still serve) as a permanent history of plantation sales, powers of attorney, wills proved, marriage contracts and so forth, including, as disposal of property or manumission by an enslaver. Montserrat was the least populated of the Leeward Island sugar-producing colonies, with a maximum number of enslaved persons estimated at 10,000 in 1775 and 6,400 in 1834. To be manumitted was a vanishingly rare possibility for any of them, as this small dataset of 1,237 individuals demonstrates.