Hello everyone. I stumbled upon this discussion a few weeks ago and read through it with deep interest. I hope you will indulge my desire to revive such an old thread. I am one of the people involved in the development of the Voyages website, from which the screenshot of the list of names on the first page of this thread came. I wanted to bring to this group's attention a parallel project that has emerged from those names, in which we try to engage people knowledgeable about the origins of African names in an attempt to identify the names' ethno-linguistic origins (in short, precisely what many of you were doing in this thread!). We have duplicated the list of Liberated African names from Voyages onto the website www.african-origins.org. Anyone interested in contributing to the website can contact me or go directly to the site. The vast majority -- 46,300 out of 91491 -- of individuals whose information is documented in that site were enslaved and sold through a port in what today would be Nigeria. We have been working extensively with Nigerians on going through these data but given the range of backgrounds of the Liberated Africans in the website, we would welcome additional feedback. I'm sorry if this seems like shameless self-promotion but I was extremely interested in the spirited discussion here.