An appeal has been made for people with family records from the early days of transatlantic enslavement to share them for an online archives project by the University of the West Indies.

Former BBC World News America anchor Laura Trevelyan, who was appointed an honorary associate fellow at UWI’s P.J. Patterson Institute for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy in October, is working on the idea.

Ms Trevelyan’s ancestors were awarded “compensation” in the 1830s as Britain abolished enslavement because the family had more than 1,000 enslaved people on the island of Grenada.

Last year, she founded the Heirs of Slavery advocacy group with seven other descendants of enslavers.

The first newsletter from Heirs of Slavery, issued this month, said the UWI idea was for an online archive of records from the early period of transatlantic enslavement.

It said: “400-year-old ship manifests and plantation registers in Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua are being held in national archives where these valuable paper records are at risk from increasingly hot weather and more frequent hurricanes.”

It added: “This is an important reparative project, which will give descendants of enslaved Africans in the various diasporas invaluable access to information about their ancestors.”

The group asked for “anyone who has their own family records, which could potentially be digitised and placed online as part of this project” to e-mail Ms Trevelyan at mrsjamesgoldston@gmail.com.

Ms Trevelyan is descended from six Trevelyans who reportedly shared £29,000 as compensation after enslavement was abolished. She says that would be worth about £2.7 million ($3.42 million) today.

She and her family travelled to Grenada, in the Caribbean, to publicly apologise for their family’s role as enslavers and pledged £100,000 ($126,800) in reparations.

The White founders of Heirs to Slavery have received criticism from some reparations campaigners, such as Esther Stanford-Xosei, who told The Voice newspaper in Britain in November that descendants of enslavers should not be allowed to “now claim centre stage in the narrative”.

Enslavers in Bermuda who were paid compensation by British taxpayers after the abolition of slavery are listed on the University College London’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery’s online database.

They include Donald McPhee Lee, The Royal Gazette’s first Editor, who claimed £41 9s 10d in 1836 as compensation for three enslaved people.

The Bermuda National Trust published island registers of enslavement in a searchable spreadsheet format last year.

They were transcribed from original, handwritten Bermuda Slave Registers for 1821, 1827, 1830, 1833 and 1834 with the permission of the Bermuda Archives.

UPDATE: this article has been edited at the request of Laura Trevelyan to remove the name of an educational institution whose involvement with the idea is not confirmed and at an early stage, as well as the name of UWI’s vice-chancellor