Dr. Carmaletta Williams, the speaker for our March 12 meeting, gave a fascinating talk on geneaology, with a special emphasis on the specific problems of tracing African-American roots, such as:
• Family separation. In most southern states, slaves were sold from their families, who often never saw them again. Only in Kentucky and Tennessee were slave families customarily kept together.
• Names. Slaves were given the surnames of their owners. When a slave was sold, he or she was given the last name of the new owner. The African-American tradition of naming children after relatives grew out of slavery. Slaves would give their children the names of family members so that later they would have a better chance of tracking them down.
• Birth dates. One way owners further humiliated slaves was by not telling them when they were born.
• The 1890 Census. These records were destroyed by water damage following a fire.
This year—1890—is an important year in African-American history. In the 1870s, the Freedmen’s Bureau, a government agency set up to help freed slaves after the Civil War, pulled out of the south, along with federal troops, leaving African-Americans to face lynchings, Jim Crow laws, harsh lives as sharecroppers that put them deeper and deeper in debt, and debtor’s prisons. By the 1890s, hundreds of thousands of southern African-Americans were moving north during the Great Migration.
During the Great Migration, laws prevented boat owners from picking up African-Americans and transporting them over rivers, so often they moved north during the winter, when they could walk over the frozen water. Many African-Americans migrated to Kansas, and in Topeka you can still find remnants of their settlement, Tennessee Town.
Dr. Williams gave these tips for tracking down ancestors:
• Ask your parents where and when they were born, and look up census data in that place for those years.
• Read the narrative section of the census. This part lists a person’s age, occupation, and other personal information.
• Check newspapers. White papers did not carry stories about black citizens, but the black press often ran chatty, gossipy stories about local African-Americans. You can get a good idea of how the people in the area lived.
