Paul Lovejoy and Robin Law (2007) have investigated the life of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua using documents from diverse places relating to his Atlantic trajectory, taking into consideration the clues provided by his autobiography. The most significant of clues are to be found in the name Baquaqua - that he chose to use after reaching freedom in the city of New York in 1847. In his autobiography, Baquaqua says that, when he was a slave in Brazil, his Christianized name was José da Costa, a common enough name in the Christian universe. The last name was derived from that of his master, Captain Clemente José da Costa. When he found shelter with activists of the American abolitionist movement, together with another escapee, the latter, a slave named João da Rocha, chose a typically American name: David. Given the possibility of choosing his own name, José da Costa opted for Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, a name that bore a reference to his cultural heritage, retracing his past in Africa, a place Baquaqua wished to return to during his lifetime.  
Law and Lovejoy argue that the names that Africans adopted when they became free possibly alluded to overcoming slavery.  
Considering the methodology in examining Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua's autobiography, one could think about using testaments as autobiographical documents that offer information about the way Africans lived in diaspora, their interests, and the circumstances and contexts of their lives. I think the same method can offer many perspectives when applied to various documents, mostly with the objective of discovering the trajectories of various individuals so that their identities may be revealed despite the long hiatus between the times in which they lived and the present time in which their lives are being studied.