In 1816, the British authorities in the Cape Colony began creating Slave Registers, as had been done in the preceding years in slave colonies in the Caribbean. Slave Registers, generally, and the Cape Colony Slave Registers in particular, are underutilised records of nineteenth-century slavery. While they are certainly problematic and flawed historical sources, they offer the possibility of tracing enslaved people over time and rebuilding some aspects of their lives from these traces.