A new online data base could help trace the roots of more than 100,000 slaves from Africa who were shipped to America in the 1800s.
Relatives will also be able to trace the roots of their ancestors to the specific village from where they came from in Africa.
The project called African Origins was developed by a team at Emory University, Atlanta, allows the general public to search for the slave's exact name or a similar sounding name and country of origin. This then brings up their age, their voyage ID and the slave ship's name they were liberated from.
The information has been been digitised from 19th century court documents when the slave trade was in the process of being stamped out.
'In the 19th century, when the slave trade was in the process of being suppressed, there were a set of international courts established around the Atlantic world and captured slave vessels were brought into these ports and adjudicated by the courts,' David Eltis, a member of the project and history professor at Emory, told CNN.
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'The people on board those vessels had their information taken down in bound registers which have survived.
'And the most interesting thing about these bound registers is it provides information on the African name, which is actually quite rare in the history of the black Atlantic,' he added.
According to the Daily Mail, Professor Eltis is now calling for people with knowledge of African naming traditions to contribute to the site in order to help identify where the individual slaves came from.
'The range of languages and practices in Africa are very great,' Dr Eltis told CNN. 'There are over 300 languages in Nigeria alone and there is no way that anyone can possibly be in command of all the names associated with those languages.'
Many African names are specific to certain regions and even small villages, meaning those who can recognise them could be very useful to the project.
Most of the original names have survived through the decades allowing ancestors to trace them right back to the village where they were born.
