In the first-ever project of its kind, Magnolia Plantation is funding genealogical research in the plantation journals of the Drayton family of Charleston.

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Ancestry.co.uk announced today that the web site will post 3 million names of slaves held across the British Empire in the early 19th century, putting hundreds of thousands of pages of searchable information online to help slaves' descendants research their past. The project will use registers that the British government created between 1813 and 1834 in an effort to stamp out the slave trade by ensuring plantation owners did not buy new slaves. Britain abolished the trade in 1807. Slavery itself was outlawed in the colonies 17 years later.