For African Americans, Uncovering a Painful Past

By Sandra Lee Jamison

It is easier for African-Americans to talk about their roots these days than it was even a decade ago. People then didn't openly debate the slave descendants of Thomas Jefferson, discuss black slave owners or see whites sitting alongside blacks searching for their shared African ancestors.

Since the first broadcast of the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries Roots, Hollywood, in such films as Glory, Amistad and Beloved, has helped depict a more complex picture of race relations in early America. Combined with new literature and scholarship on the African American experience such as John Hope Franklin's Runaway Slaves, the companion to the four-part, six-hour PBS series Africans in America: America's Journey Through Slavery, and Microsoft's CD-ROM encyclopedia, the Encarta Africana, there is respect and understanding for the lives of African ancestors.

But this new openness cannot repair all the damage done to the historical record of black people, nor overcome the pain of re-creating it. For even after slavery, segregation forced the creation of two Americas, and family-history seekers must be equipped to navigate in two sets of records--one black and one white. Racial identities were sometimes hidden as blacks "passed" from one race for societal survival. Military records, church archives, city directories, newspapers and a wealth of information from county, state and federal government agencies have to be researched with race in mind.

For many, the hardest part of piecing together individual lives of your family line is finding them listed in the same inventories that include cattle, plows and flatware--not just hard but gut wrenching.

For Southern plantation owners and gentleman farmers, enslaved Africans were simply investments. Ledgers and diaries from their estate archives documented who had to be fed, housed and rationed clothing, blankets and utensils: "Essie" received a pot, ladle and blankets for her child, and "Mose" was hired out to a neighboring farm.

Practically speaking, slave transactions provide solid genealogical connections. Slave names are recorded in wills, bills of sale and even dowries. Records from slave-ship cargo lists, captain's logbooks, ship route maps, white family histories and oral histories once available only in obscure books and dusty archives are available today on computer databases and widely disseminated via the Internet and on CD-ROMS.

And more is on the way. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize deteriorating pages of diaries, autobiographies, primary texts and slave narratives for inclusion in the university's database.

There are two websites valued and respected as resources for up-to-date information and discussion for the African ancestored. One is a website founded by Mississippi State University, Afrigeneas www.msstate.edu/Archives/History/afrigen/) the other is Christine's genealogy website www.ccharity.com)

Today's tools certainly make the search for black roots easier. The trick is to steel yourself for what you are likely to find.

Sandra Lee Jamison, a TIME research librarian, is the author of Finding Your People