This Map Reveals Exactly Where Your Haitian Family Came From

No map can show exactly where your Haitian family came from — but the published research lets us map the system your ancestors were moved through: ten stops, from the African coast to French ports to the three provinces of Saint-Domingue, with the real numbers for each. And the last stop is the one that can give you an exact answer. In this video we count down the map: 📌 The African coasts the French trade used: Senegambia and the Bight of Benin in the 17th century, the Loango coast and West Central Africa as the primary departure point in the second half of the 18th, and Biafra and Sierra Leone in the 19th — a century when Saint-Domingue no longer existed 📌 Geggus's published figures: Congos at 24% of the enslaved population in 1789; Fongbe speakers at 5.9% of the colony (16.3% of Africans on northern sugar estates); Africans as a whole just over half (about 53.5%) 📌 The French trade: 4,118 crossings (11% of the transatlantic trade), 1,381,404 Africans deported 1551–1875, Nantes at 44% of expeditions 📌 Saint-Domingue as the primary destination from 1715: three quarters of French expeditions, 80% of the enslaved people sold, and 40,000 disembarked in 1790 (19,000 at Cap-Français) 📌 How the North, West and South differed: where Africans were least prominent, where they were most densely concentrated, and where the largest community of free people of color lived 📌 The twist at number one: the largest single group in the colony in 1789 was people born in Saint-Domingue 📌 How the early and late arrivals line up with the 2013 PLOS Genetics finding of two African influxes into the Caribbean — and why that is a reading, not a proof Every claim in this video is drawn from published research and documented history. Where numbers vary by source, we say so. 🔎 Want to know which stop on this map actually belongs to your family? Our surname and record research service goes directly into the surviving colonial, church and civil records tied to your name. Link pinned in the comments. 💬 Drop your surname, your region of Haiti and which stop you think is yours — we read every comment. Sources referenced in this video: - Geggus, D. (2024). "Kongomania and the Haitian Revolution." The Americas 81(2), 219–247. - Geggus, D. (2023). "Kongomania Redux." The Americas. - Bibliothèque nationale de France exhibition, "France–Amériques: The Slave Trade" (heritage.bnf.fr) - Moreno-Estrada, A., et al. (2013). "Reconstructing the Population Genetic History of the Caribbean." PLOS Genetics. - University of Maryland, "Colony in Crisis" project - Association de Généalogie d'Haïti: surveys of early civil registers - Reference summaries of the Atlantic slave trade and Saint-Domingue (including the eighteenth-century estimate by Hilliard d'Auberteuil) Subscribe — every week this channel goes back into the real documented history behind the Caribbean/African diaspora. #HaitianHistory #Haiti #Genealogy #SlaveTrade #AncestryDNA #CaribbeanHistory #BlackHistory