Your Guide to Finding African American Anecestors

Books to help guide you

Burroughs Black Roots: a beginners guide to tracing the African American Family Tree.  (find in a library)

Croom. Genealogists Guide to Discovering Your African American Roots. ( find in a library)

Woodtor. Finding a Place Called Home .  (find in a library)

You may enjoy reading a chronicle of one woman's quest to find her African American roots in Somerset Homecoming: Recovering a Lost Heritage by Dorothy Redford. (find in a library)

Several books on researching your African American ancestors are identified on the AfriGeneas Bookstore page.

Societies you may want to join

The Fred Hart Williams Genealogy Society is dedicated to researching African American families.  It meets at the Detroit Public Library. 

If you join the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical  Society you will receive a journal.
 

Selected Online Sites for More Information.

Hogan. African American Research. This three part article provides a good overview of the challenges and resources relevant to searching African American ancestors and ends with a case study. Links to parts 2 and 3 are at the beginning.

A briefer guide is the Rootsweb lesson on African American Ancestry

Take time to explore these two major sites

1) AfriGeneas.  
2) Christine's Genealogy

Because many records on African Americans are kept at the National Archives, you will want to read the NARA Page on African American Research.

See also these articles in Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Reccords Administration "Genealogy Note" articles on African American research using records in the National Archives.

Cliff Murray has built a site called African American Lifelines to help the beginning researcher.

If you create your own web page, you may want to add it to the African American Genealogy Web Ring; if not, you may just want to browse the pages.

More Links:
Cyndi's List topic African American
Geneasearch: African American Genealogy
 

Specific Topics of Interest

Cemeteries :

African American Cemeteries online

Census:

African American Census Records Online

Church:

Directory of African American Religious Bodies (find in a library.)

Migration

Visit the website for "In Motion" a site designed to help African Americans understand and trace the migrations of their ancestors. It has a huge database... 17,000 pages of text, 8, 350 photographs and 65 maps. It will take you some time to explore the wealth of information there.

Military:

For a brief summary of African American particpation in military conflicts, see African American Freedom Fighters: Soldiers for Liberty.

See: African Americans in Early American Military History

See: Black Loyalists

See: African American Warriers

Names

Because of the heritage of slavery, surnames for African Americans may be connected to other families or simply adopted as a choice upon emancipation.

"Large Slaveholders of 1860 and African American surname matches from 1870" : In 2001 Tom Black undertook a study to determine the correlation of surnames of slave owners with surnames of freed slaves. He estimates that in 1860, slaveholders of 200 or more slaves, while constituting less than 1 % of the total number of U.S. slaveholders held 20-30% of the total number of slaves in the U.S. His study of these large slaveholders spans 150 southern counties in 10 states and direct descendants of slaveholders can determine if their ancestor was in this category; African American descendants of persons who were enslaved in a particular County in 1860, if they have an idea of the surname of the slaveholder, can check this list for the surname. If the surname is found, they can then view the census image elsewhere for the details listed regarding the sex, age and color of the slaves.

In his article "What's in a Name" (Family Chronicle Feb. 2007 p. 17) Rick Crume notes that since may African Americans have Welsh names, there is the argument that many slave holders were Welsh and mentions an interesting website that argues against this notion: Why do Welsh names seem to be so common within the African American community ? 

To find others researching African-Americans, search the Afrigeneas Surname Database and Registry.

Newspapers

See if your local public library has this book (if not, suggest they purchase it!) African American Newspapers and Periodicals: a National Bibliography and Union List. (find in a library)

Index to Black Newspapers (find in a library)

America's first African-American Newspaper, Freedom's Journal, is available online.

Organizations and Societies

Freedman's Bureau

Finding Slave Ancestors: 

Slave Narratives from a WPA project. The American Memory Project also has narratives from this project, Born in Slavery

There were also many published slave narratives; some are available on North American Slave Narratives.

The International Society of Sons and Daughters of Slave Ancestry has a small web site with contact information.

David Paterson has written an excellent article on finding Georgia's Slave Population in Legal Records; even if you are researching another state, this should serve as a guide as to the types of records you might find and where you might look.

AfriGeneas has a database of slave data on the web that you can search. You can also contribute information.

More Links...

Access Genealogy African American Genealogy

Cyndi's List: African American Genealogy

Genealinks: African American Genealogy

 

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This page last updated March 26, 2007
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