Charlie Carr watched as at least 15 friends were thrown overboard because the ship was too heavy. He was shipped from Africa to Georgia 50 years after the overseas slave trade was supposed to have been abolished in 1808. And he fought in the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War but never was able to secure a pension for his family.

Emma Davis-Hamilton thinks she is part of Carr's family. She learned about the man, who may be related to her grandfather, after finding his slave records from 150 years ago.

(ENLARGE)

Sara Hopkins / AJC (ENLARGE)

Documents like this one in the archives in Morrow record transactions for slaves.

SYMPOSIUM The slave manifests will be unveiled at the annual Atlanta Black Family History Symposium. The free symposium is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the National Archives Southeast Region, 5780 Jonesboro Road, Morrow. Anyone interested in attending can register online at www.atlanta-bfhd.org, call 770-968-2100 or e-mail morrow.resources@nara.gov. RELATED: • More Clayton news

On Saturday, 14,000 slave manifests like the ones Davis-Hamilton found will be unveiled at the Atlanta Black Family History Symposium at the National Archives for the Southeast Region in Morrow, in Clayton County.

The documents track slaves in the late 18th century and the 19th century who came to Savannah, Mobile, Charleston, Beaufort or Jekyll Island — like Davis-Hamilton's family. There are also some manifests from Africa.

Saturday, archivists and historian Alan Huffman, author of "Mississippi in Africa," will teach residents how to use the documents to find their ancestors.

Davis-Hamilton has spent the past 20 years traveling the nation searching for her ancestors. Through DNA analysis, she was able to track her roots to Ghana and Nigeria, but the trail ended there.

"I would love to find where we belong," said the Atlanta woman, a volunteer at the National Archives. "I think Charlie may be where I belong."

The U.S. Slave Trade Act prohibited transatlantic slave trade after Jan. 1, 1808. As part of the law, any ship weighing more than 40 tons or carrying slaves between U.S. ports was required to file manifests with its home and destination ports.

In addition to names, some of the manifests on display have the slave's height, weight, age and race. It also has the name of the shipper and the purchaser.

"This is like a gold mine in genealogy because you are working with such little information," said Eric Sawyer, chairman of Saturday's event. "If you can link the slave to his owner, it opens the door to find other relatives."

Students and archivists are putting all that information into a computer database to make the information available within moments. But for now, most of the manifests remain in 32 boxes.

"For white people, it's relatively easy, because they kept records. But by and large, the blacks didn't have last names up until 1870," Huffman said. "It's got to get easier because there are better databases being compiled."

In 2001, Huffman traveled to Liberia to find the relatives of a group of freed slaves from a plantation near Natchez, Miss. After being released, the slaves returned to Africa and settled their own colony called Mississippi in Africa — the title of Huffman's book.

"I thought I would just do some Google searches and find where these people were. But it wasn't that easy," Huffman said. "The lines have crossed and re-crossed. The same names are repeated in black and white families."

Complicating things even more is, besides the lack of last names, African-Americans sometimes took the name of their masters or chose entirely new names, Davis-Hamilton said.

"Europeans can track their history to the 1300s. But if you are African-American, you hit a brick wall in the 1870s," said Davis-Hamilton, a member of the Atlanta metro chapter of the African-American Historical Genealogy Society.

Davis-Hamilton has tracked her roots from rural South Georgia to her paternal grandfather Henry Carr in Florida.

She was looking for other relatives when she stumbled on Charlie Carr's records in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., before the documents were transferred to the federal institution's Clayton County repository.

Carr, born in the Congo, was one of the last slaves to come over. He traveled on the ship Wanderer, which docked in Jekyll Island in 1858.

Through the manifests, Davis-Hamilton was able to track Carr's pension records in the U.S. Colored Troops and a doctor's checkup. She then found his wife, son and nephew, who each applied for Carr's military pension.

"Everything is a clue," she said. "To me, this is like a kid in Toys R Us."

The manifests will be a permanent part of the archives' collection in Morrow and available for anyone to access.

"Any big chunk of data you got is going to increase the chances that someone can connect the dots or fill in the pieces," Huffman said. "Without the slave manifests, you just get to that point, and that's the end. Most people aren't going to be able to go to Liberia or Senegal to just find this information.

"You have to be committed to it because it's laborious and tedious. But the payoff is you get these incredible stories and patterns. It gives you a sense of where you came from."