African-American Genealogy | History Detectives

Video:
African American Genealogy

How to conduct African American genealogical research.

Do-it-yourself genealogical research has become a popular hobby for millions of Americans.Some historical factors can inhibit or aid your research, based on events surrounding thelineage you are tracing. One potential obstacle to tracing African-American lineage isslavery, an institution that broke family bonds and made record keeping nearly impossible.Because African-American slaves were considered property, often a bill of sale - bearing justthe age and gender of the person sold - is the only record for an individual living in apre-Civil War slave-holding state.

The challenges of reaching back to the period before the Civil War are great, but a host oftools are available if you know where to look. One invaluable resource is The U.S. NationalArchives. Documents created by federal agencies after the Civil War provide a wealth ofpersonal data about the nearly four million African-Americans freed by the EmancipationProclamation.

For example, The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (or Freedmen's Bureau), established by Congress on March 3, 1865, has a wealth of searchable information.Established to supervise relief and educational efforts for refugees and freed slaves, the Freedmen'sBureau helped countless African-Americans reunite with relatives at the end of the Civil War. Thoughofficially disbanded in 1872, the bureau still maintains detailed records concerning African-Americanmilitary service, plantation conditions, migration, the names of slave owners, and a host offamily-related matters such as birth, marriage and death certificates.

The most reliable records for the pre-Civil War era may be oral histories. Genealogical histories werepassed down through stories told from one generation to the next. Since this was often the only way topreserve one's lineage, keeping the facts straight was of paramount importance.

In the 1930s the U.S. Library of Congress created Voices from the Days of Slavery, an oral history project developed to record andtranscribe accounts by surviving witnesses of the Civil War and slavery. With the development of audiotape recordings, oral histories have become much easier to collect and preserve, and it is now notuncommon to find genealogical information through various individual collectors.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7sa7SZ6arn1%2BkvaN7x6KqraeirrGmwMScq6Kulah8tbHCoaWiqaWafKKy0aKamqZdlrqmvsicmKdll5q7pq3LqJ6yZ5mjsabEjaGrpqQ%3D