Bermudians will be able to trace their slave ancestors on an extensive new database set to go on-line next month.

Thousands of names from Bermuda slave registers — kept in storage for 200 years — are being published on the Internet within the next few weeks, British heritage website Ancestry.co.uk confirmed yesterday.

It will give people access to information in the registers about slaves' sex, colour, age, country of birth and how, where and when they were employed.

Slave registers were made compulsory by the British Government after the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. They were intended to monitor plantation owners and other masters to ensure they did not buy new slaves.

Historians have been laboriously converting the information on more than 180,000 pages of documents from the 'Former Colonial Dependencies' Slave Register Collection, 1812-1834' into a computerised format.

So far, a comprehensive record of nearly 100,000 Barbados slaves is already up and running. From next month, Bermuda, Jamaica, Bahamas, Cayman Islands and Grenada will be added to the list.

Organisers had hoped to get Bermuda's records on-line by September but have been held back because of the time consuming nature of digitizing and indexing the data.

Ancestry.co.uk spokesman Simon Ziviani said: "The 12-month project by Ancestry.co.uk to put the entire 186,000 pages of the collection on-line is a huge undertaking. "However, it is a very important collection for anyone wishing to explore this time in either black history or the history of the British Empire."

It is thought Bermuda's first slave register was completed in 1821, with updated versions following in 1827, 1830-31 and 1834, the year of emancipation.

Bermuda is said to have more reliable data than many islands, because the authorities here were not so aggressive withholding information from the British Government.

Ultimately, the website will publish details on three million slaves in Britain's colonies. Its entire collection has been drawn from about 700 registers taken from 23 British territories and dependencies.

Each colony kept its own registers, while copies were also submitted to the UK's Office for the Registry of Colonial Slaves.

After the office was disbanded, about 200,000 pages of names were placed in the National Archives in London.

Historians on the Island are creating a similar project at Bermuda Maritime Museum, by compiling a comprehensively indexed, microfilmed account of Bermuda's slaves based on the Island's copies of the slave registers.

There were no plantations in Bermuda, but many slaves worked on the land, aboard ships and in homes.

They arrived on the Island through shipwrecks or piracy, on ships trading in the Caribbean or directly from Africa.

At first they were used in the tobacco-growing industry but, when that collapsed in the late 1600s, they were enslaved in the booming ship-building industry.

Slaves were forced to man shipyards, construct warehouses and build ships, sent out to sea as highly skilled sailors and made to work as carpenters, craftsmen and domestic servants.

The Royal Gazette has been marking the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act with its Break The Chains campaign, which highlights the plight of at least 12 million modern day slaves.

We have been encouraging people to sign Anti-Slavery International's on-line petition which calls for world leaders to take action to end all forms of human captivity, including human trafficking, child labour, bonded labour and forced marriage.

To sign the petition, visit www.antislavery.org/2007/actionsign.