
In commemoration of Black History Month, I find it fitting to help with researching and discovering any African American ancestors you may have. I have found many, many wonderful websites to assist with this quest.
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According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the host of the wonderful PBS series, Finding Your Roots, and the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University: " The fact that most fundamental genealogical information was systematically withheld from our people has, I think, produced an understandably inordinate compulsion among African Americans to find out not just from whence we descend in Africa but also details on our family tree on this side of the ocean. ."
In my humble opinion as an educator, this difficult research was complicated for many years due to the failure of our education system to teach the truth about slavery and free Blacks in American society.
For so many years our schools did not teach us the real story of slavery or of African Americans' lives in colonial America, pre-Civil War years, post-Civil War years, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. As a child growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I know that I was not taught the true and detailed history of these eras. Even during the 1970s to the 1990s when my children grew up it was not taught truthfully. In fact, during the late 1990s and early 2000s when I was a school administrator in Pennsylvania it still was not taught as it should have been. Perhaps we all learned a small bit about Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass, but certainly not enough or in any depth. However and thankfully, education regarding African American history has come a long way but has much further to go.
In searching for truthful information about our African American ancestors we often had to look far and wide to glean just a bit of this history. Much of it seemed not to be recorded. Research regarding possible ancestors was almost impossible. . But today we can discover so much information that many of us thought was lost or never written down.
Some of the most interesting information that I discovered and helped to educate me about slavery and African American ancestors I found in websites about Fugitive Slave ads in American newspapers from 150+ years ago. Fugitive slave ads abounded in American newspapers until the end of the Civil War. Abhorrent in their treatment of people as property, these brief descriptions of African Americans who escaped enslavement, albeit sometimes temporarily, bear witness to the bravery and unique characteristics of individuals who defied a massively powerful system allied against them. Some of these people may have been our ancestors.

One of the best books I have ever read is The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

This book fueled my goal to continue researching our African American ancestors even though his book was a work of fiction. Here is Mr. Coate’s description of his powerful book:
“Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage–and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child–but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn’t understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram’s private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation family, Thena, his chosen mother, a woman of few words and many secrets, and Sophia, a young woman fighting her own war even as she and Hiram fall in love, he becomes determined to escape the only home he’s ever known.
So begins an unexpected journey into the covert war on slavery that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the deep South to dangerously utopic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, all Hiram wants is to return to the Walker Plantation to free the family he left behind–but to do so, he must first master his magical gift and reconstruct the story of his greatest loss.
This is a bracingly original vision of the world of slavery, written with the narrative force of a great adventure. Driven by the author’s bold imagination and striking ability to bring readers deep into the interior lives of his brilliantly rendered characters, The Water Dancer is the story of America’s oldest struggle–the struggle to tell the truth–from one of our most exciting thinkers and beautiful writers.”
Mr. Coates’ words and descriptions struck a nerve in me spurring my interest in African American genealogy.
Enslavement presents a major obstacle for anyone tracing Black American lineages. Because enslaved people were treated as property, records that can help Black American families research their genealogy are often difficult to come by. These online databases and record collections are valuable resources for anyone navigating the challenge of researching formerly enslaved people.
Freedom on the Move | Cornell University - Rediscovering the Stories of Self-Liberating People - a database of fugitives from American Slavery
Digital Library on American Slavery (uncg.edu) – Digital Library on American Slavery
Slaveholders and African Americans 1860-1870 (rootsweb.com) – Large Slaveholders of 1860 and African American Surname Matches
Fold3 Search – Southern Claims The records of the Southern Claims Commission are a rich source of details on Black Americans in the southern U.S. both during and after the Civil War. They include names and ages of formerly enslaved people, their places of residence, names of enslavers, and manumission records. The records also provide information about conditions faced by free Black people and a great deal of first-person background on the experiences of Black Americans in the Civil War era.
Slavery Era Insurance Registry (ca.gov) – Slavery Era Insurance Registry
American Slave Narratives (virginia.edu) – An Online Anthology
Slave Voyages – Explore the Origins and Forced Relocations of Enslaved African Across the Atlantic World
Unknown No Longer | Virginia Museum of History & Culture (virginiahistory.org) – Unknown No Longer
Slave Biographies – Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network
Texas Runaway Slave Project - East Texas Digital Archives (sfasu.edu) – Texas Runaway Slave Project
Free at Last? Slavery in Pittsburgh in the 18th and 19th Centuries - Explore the newly discovered papers
It is my sincere hope that these websites and repositories may be of some help to those researching their African American roots in America.
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