(CNN) A woman abducted from Africa as a child has been identified as the last known survivor of the slave ships that took kidnapped West Africans to the United States.

Hannah Durkin, a lecturer at Newcastle University in the UK, was carrying out other research when she came across multiple sources that mentioned a woman called Redoshi, the university said in a press release

Durkin pieced together Redoshi's life story through a number of archival sources, starting with her kidnapping in what is now Benin at the age of 12 and her passage to Mobile, Alabama on board the "Clotilda," the last slave ship to arrive in the US in 1860, carrying 116 people.

During her research, Durkin discovered that Redoshi was forced to marry on board the ship.

She and her husband, known as William or Billy, were bought by Washington Smith, a founder of the Bank of Selma and owner of the Bogue Chitto plantation in Alabama, where she was enslaved and renamed Sally Smith, working in the house and the fields for almost five years.

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