Websites expand ancestry records of enslaved people
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Members of a Civil War re-enactment troop line up with the White House in the background during Juneteenth celebrations in Washington on June 19, 2023. Photo: Aaron Schwartz/Xinhua via Getty Images
Two genealogy sites are adding troves of historical materials about enslaved people in the U.S. to databases, which could give many of their descendants a fuller picture of their families' histories.
- The moves come as the nation on Thursday celebrates Juneteenth, the annual celebration of the end of slavery.
Why it matters: In recent years, descendants of enslaved people have gained unprecedented access to collections of long-lost family records online — made possible by advances in technology, AI, and DNA testing.
The big picture: A growing number of Black Americans are tracing how their families were torn apart, received Anglo names and sold across the country because of slavery, which began in the British colonies more than 400 years ago and officially ended with the 13th Amendment in 1865.
- They're also learning about how some relatives escaped slavery and what their lives were like in the aftermath of emancipation.
Driving the news: Ancestry.com announced last week that it will significantly expand its free Articles of Enslavement records collection — an archive of newspaper articles documenting the experiences of enslaved people in the U.S.
- The website is expanding its archive nearly fourfold, using proprietary AI models and machine learning to index 110,000 newly discovered articles that reference more than half a million people.
- Many of the original newspaper articles contain never-before-seen information about enslaved people in communities where courthouse and community records were otherwise destroyed or lost.
How it works: Users can visit Ancestry's expanded landing page dedicated to enslavement records and search by name or explore a state with the most records.
- AI will comb through the once-hard-to-search data for names of enslaved people, connecting names in Ancestry's other databases of public documents to piece together puzzles.
Zoom in: Michigan State University announced this week it's publishing new data on its "Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade" website, Enslaved.org.
- That's a project in partnership with other organizations, such as FamilySearch International, that documents the lives of enslaved people of African descent.
- The latest data release makes information regarding 2 million Black Americans born before emancipation in the 1900 Census available for discovery and download.
- The expanded dataset will significantly aid researchers' ability to identify formerly enslaved people and their families for academic study, the university said.
What they're saying: "Tracing people from the era of enslavement into the generations that followed emancipation presents exceptional challenges to descendants and researchers," Walter Hawthorne, an MSU history professor and head of the Enslaved.org project, said in a statement.
- That's because managing databases across multiple sites remains challenging, along with ensuring the long-term preservation of projects and resources, MSU said.
- "The details of these records can lead to key breakthroughs in helping descendants of previously enslaved people in the U.S. make discoveries about their families prior to 1870," Nicka Sewell-Smith, Ancestry's senior story producer and genealogist, said in an announcement.
State of play: Juneteenth celebrations began in Texas, and commemorate June 19, 1865 — the day Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, with news that the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed by President Lincoln more than two years earlier.
- The celebrations gained in national prominence after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, which helped galvanize support for recognizing Juneteenth nationwide. It became a federal holiday under a bill President Biden signed in 2021.
- The racial reckoning inspired by Floyd's death led many Black Americans to delve into their family histories and confront their connections to slavery.
Go deeper: Juneteenth celebration expands despite civil rights backlash
