The first SHADD workshop took place on October 17 – 18, 2014 at York University in Toronto. This workshop outlined a plan to identify testimonies of West Africans from the era of the slave trade from the 16th to the 19th century, including autobiographies and biographical accounts. Our objective was to organize a preliminary inventory of materials assembled by members of the team through the establishment of a common dataset to describe the enslavement of Africans, explore the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave migration on West Africa and determine how migration affected the development of the Atlantic world. The Harriet Tubman Institute supported the workshop, under the direction of Paul Lovejoy.