African Americans are uncovering new facets in their personal family narratives by using the Web as another tool to help them take a peek into the past. Genealogy services such as Ancestry.com enable users to begin to create individual family trees online by tracing the paths of their ancestors through a collection of historical records. As a digital complement to the manual legwork that often comes with doing genealogical research, the Website, along with a host of other Internet-based companies, effectively cuts down on time and travel expenses by pulling data from archives and bringing it to users’ home computer screens.
“The real history of the African American people will be built around individual achievements and accomplishments,” says Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. “Creating our family trees will show our young people that in spite of tremendous odds, our ancestors made a way of out of no way; genealogy lets [us] see how they did that.” With roughly 24,000 databases to find matches, Ancestry.com, he says, is a good place to start.
“In the ’70s and ’80s, it would take a few months before you made your [first] big discovery,” says Megan Smolenyak, a genealogist and chief family historian for Ancestry.com. “Now it’s within minutes. The dual revolutions of the Internet and DNA have created this mass democratization. What’s kind of cool is that [people] are doing it just to know the stories of their ancestors, whatever they were.”
Earlier in the year, Ancestry.com had been trying to make the public aware of its newly launched, vast database of African American historical records. Rev. Al Sharpton agreed to have his roots traced in tandem with the launch, which resulted in a genealogical connection between the civil rights activist and the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, a longtime segregationist. Traffic on the Website mushroomed from an average of 7,000 new family trees a day to 46,000. Yet even before the Sharpton — Thurmond connection made national headlines, the Provo, Utah-based company saw its revenues surge from $47 million in 2002 to $151 million in 2006–an increase of roughly 300%, as interest in genealogy grows.
Users can sign on for a three-day free trial period; afterwards, the Website has a subscription-based model with fees ranging from $29.95 for a monthly U.S. Deluxe membership or $155.40 annually, to $34.95 a month for a World Deluxe membership, or $299.40 annually. So far, Ancestry.com, which has been online for nearly a decade, touts more than 750,000 subscribers worldwide.
To start the research process, begin by talking to your oldest living relatives and using the scraps of information that you get, says Jane Ailes, a Virginia-based genealogist
with the company Research Consultants. “Then look for the evidence to back up the things that people are telling you. Every family story is different. There are more things going up online but not everything is there.”In 2000, when Brian Williams, a Brooklyn, New York, native who works as an insurance investigator, realized that the relatives on his mother’s side were passing away, he decided that it was time to take on another role and become the family griot. Williams discovered that his mother’s side of the family came from Georgia and eventually took a drive to the South. “I was able to locate my great-great [grandparents’] marriage certificate,” says the 43-year-old. “Once I made a move in the direction of my ancestors, [my family members] would make a move toward me. I had to be the catalyst.”
Williams says that he spent roughly six hours a day poring over marriage and Census records as well as data from the Department of Vital Statistics. His research illuminated the scope of what Williams knew about his family’s origin. “I found out where my family came from and the occupations that they were engaged in,” Williams adds. “This information put everything in another perspective and I started to feel unshackled by the residue of slavery. As an only child, I’ve been able to put my family history together.”
A year after the trip to Georgia, Williams continued digging up information by going online to Ancestry.com to look up Census records from 1930. Later, Williams took another step and used the services of AfricanAncestry.com (see “Tracing Your Ancestry,” Techwatch, August 2005); the company traced his DNA to the Ga tribe in Ghana. On his father’s side, Williams discovered that his genetic roots were from Italy. “I’m not done [yet],” Williams offers, “it’s a lifelong journey.”
The African American collection on the Ancestry.com Website highlights critical junctures in our history. For example, a user can look through military records from the Civil War as well as slave narratives and records from the Freedmen’s Bureau or the Freedman’s Bank. “Many people assume that all their ancestors were slaves,” says Smolenyak. “We can tell from Census numbers that about 10% percent of African Americans were free before the Civil War. That doesn’t sound like a huge number, but if you do the math, by the time you get back to the 1860s, there is a decent chance that one of your ancestors might have been free.” Even the descendants of slaves can search online past what genealogists often refer to as “the Wall of 1870”–the first Census in which freed slaves were listed by their actual names. The collection also includes passenger lists from various entry ports (into the United States) and immigration records dating back to about 1820.
BLACK ENTERPRISE’s own news editor, Nicole Marie Richardson, was able to use the archived passenger lists to pinpoint her grandmother’s emigration route from Dutch St. Maarten to America in 1924. “I was able to find out the day she first arrived here, where she lived, and what her occupation was listed as,” says Richardson. By entering the family information she already had onto the Website, Richardson discovered several other relatives who had made the journey with her grandmother. “In one of the cases,” says Richardson, “the records identified a family member I was not aware of. It [even] told me that he was paying $22 a month in rent.”
While doing research on his own family with the help of Ailes and genealogist Johni Cerny, Gates, host of the landmark PBS series African-American Lives and the author of the book Finding Oprah’s Roots: Finding Your Own (Crown; $19.95), discovered a relative who fought in the American Revolution and received a pension.
“What this technology can show,” Gates stresses, “is that our people triumphed over adversity. The sacrifices our ancestors made produced this vibrant generation of African American people. We find tales of triumph and nobility everywhere.”