Reparative geneaology can't fix everything — but it's a start
Projects like the Enslaved and Enslavers DNA Project, Last Seen and the Griot's oral history library are helping Black families find the stories of their ancestors.
We all want to know how to place ourselves in the great star map of human stories. Whose DNA made me who I am? How will the amino-acid sentences in my DNA shape the people who come after me? Neuroscience says: our brains run on stories. Our heads are full of mirror neurons, like inside-out disco balls. We can’t help but see animals in clouds, faces in ink blots. We know who we are through other people, both the living and the dead. Making meaning is a psychic necessity for us, like eating food is a physical one; when our process of personal meaning-making is fractured, it breaks us, too.
That craving to know who we are fueled the DNA-testing boom of the past decade. If you’ve done old-school paper record genealogy, you know it’s not always accurate. But it does remind us of this truth: having a heavily mapped-out family tree is something European Americans take wildly for granted.
As Ahmed Johnson, a reference librarian with the Library of Congress, notes in this blog post, “Researching African American genealogy is quite challenging. It is a lifelong journey — not a quick trip… In 1860, nearly 4 million enslaved individuals lived in the United States but they didn’t appear on federal census records. Therefore, you have to search for other records to help you locate family names and push your family history back further.”
Direct-to-consumer DNA testing is notoriously invasive when it comes to private data — not everyone feels comfortable doing it — but it’s also opened new doors for Black families doing geneaological research. Often, that’s not directly through platforms like 23&Me, but by uploading DNA results to sites like GEDMatch.
Reparative Geneaology
GEDMatch’s forums list serveral research groups, including the Enslaved and Enslavers Ancestors DNA Project, a private Facebook group where people share their test kit results. The goal is to identify racial DNA overlaps in GEDMatch, so that people of European descent can share information and documents — wills, photos, diaries, probate documents — with Black families, and help them to fill in missing geneology data.
Projects like this are sometimes described as “reparative genealogy.” There are proposals to use the data in service to reparations. The practice also has a value in the here and now. Lotte Lieb Dula, who started the research group Reparations 4 Slavery in response to unearthing slaveholding documents during her family research, describes the work this way:
Reparative Genealogy is the act of researching our heritage, acknowledging our connection to slavery, and daylighting the history of those our ancestors enslaved.
While we can't change history, or our ancestors' actions, we can take responsibility for finding slavery-era family records. We can provide them online so that descendants of the enslaved can begin to find their ancestors. Repatriation of these records is not just symbolic — engaging in this form of repair connects the present to the past, and the living with those who came before them. Connecting families to ancestors is a solid first step toward reparative relationship-building.
These aren’t the only groups doing this work. The Linked Descendants Working Group, based in Oakland, Ca., maintains several in-person repartative geneology meetups throughout the country; Bittersweet is an offshoot of LDWG started by writers, with the goal of sharing members’ stories.
The Griot Museum of Black History
The Griot, as its name implies, puts an emphasis on the“story” part of history:
In some west African countries, the griot, is responsible for collecting and preserving the history that is of value and relevance to the community. A “living repository” of oral tradition, the griot is often seen as a societal leader who gathers and holds important invents such as births, deaths, marriages, and cultural traditions. The trusted griot often interprets or critiques events before presenting them to the village leaders. A historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet and/or musician, the griot shares stories through a variety of formats. Likewise, The Griot Museum also collects, holds, preserves, and shares the stories, culture, and history of Black people.
Lois Conley founded the Griot Museum of Black History (2505 St Louis Ave, St. Louis, MO 63106) in 1997. At the time, it was one of only two museums of its kind in the U.S., and the first in St. Louis dedicated to Black history.
Last fall, the museum made news when it was announced that David Adjaye, the architect that designed the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, would be creating a city-wide art installation that would end at The Griot’s campus as part of the COUNTERPUBLIC triennial.
The publicity will hopsefully shine a brighter light on the work Conley has been doing for 25 years. That includes building the permanent exhibits by hand, writing grants, finding volunteers, and creating exhibits on Mill Creek Valley and HIV/AIDS in the Black community. (Robert Rayford, a teen who lived a few blocks away from the museum, is considered to be the first person to be diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in North America.)
Conley’s also been assembling a huge library of oral histories, and she is looking at it as a long game — those stories, especially stories of elders in danger of being lost, will help people who aren’t even born yet put together their family histories. Last spring, The Griot launched the Black HerStory Initative, and it continues to collect for the Impact HIV/AIDS Initative. (Disclosure: as a former neighbor in St. Louis Place, I attended meetings at The Griot, and provided some volunteer work for that project.)
If you’re in St. Louis and haven’t been, or haven’t gone in a while, or if you know you’ll be passing through St. Louis: here’s info on planning your visit.
The Last Seen Project
Last summer, Jill Lepore’s history podcast, The Last Archive, featured Dr. Judith Giesberg, the director of The Last Seen Project. Giesberg talked about discovering ads in newspapers placed by formerly enslaved people trying to re-connect with lost spouses, parents, children, siblings and extended family in the decades after emancipation. In 2017, Giesberg and a team of helpers launched an open archive of materials accessible to teachers, scholars, and people researching their family trees.
As the website notes, the project “aims to identify, digitize, transcribe, and publish ads placed in newspapers across the United States (and beyond) by formerly enslaved people searching for family members and loved ones after emancipation. These newspaper ads began appearing in the 1830s (our earliest ad appeared in The Liberator in 1832) and greatly increased in frequency in the years immediately following emancipation (1865) and continued well into the 20th century. (The collection includes an ad that appeared in The Richmond Planet in 1922.) These ads not only document the extensive separation of Black families through the domestic slave trade but also attest to the persistent efforts thousands of people made to reunite with those from whom they had been separated. In the ads, mothers search for children separated through sale, daughters and sons seek parents, men and women inquire about partners and spouses, and siblings search for one another—they include names, describe events, and recall last seen locations.”
The keywords run from A (African Methodist Episcopal Church) to not quite Z (widow). There are ads seeking information from one coast to the other — as well as stories of reunions:
There are now nearly 5,000 newspaper scans in the archive. Those scans are being corrected and transcribed by volunteers, who also tag them to make them searchable online. You can sign up to help with that work to help people find their ancestors, or reach out if you see an ancestor mentioned in an ad.
And if it seems over the top to suggest old newspapers can have big, real-life impact on human lives: read this New York Times article from last summer. Taiwo Kujichagulia-Seitu, a California native, found an ad on Last Seen placed in a Louisiana newspaper by her great-great-great grandfather, Edward Taylor. That started the process of finding family in Maryland, and triggered a wider search for more clues and information. The reporter, Rachel Swarms, hoped her story would reach someone out there with information to share that would help propel Kujichagulia-Seitu’s research.
But there are countless other Black geneaologists out there who are looking for clues and ways to stitch fractured family histories back together. Uploading DNA kits or spending a few hours a week tagging ads on Last Seen seems like a tiny gesture — but it might be a life-changing skeleton key for someone else.
This is such a great article! I kept meaning to look up what Grio/Griot meant. There’s a site called The Grio that I read and wasn’t sure.
The fact that Black people often aren’t able to do the genealogy projects that white folx take for granted is a fairly recent “oh, ok, dang” for me. It wasn’t at all obvious and it should be. Thanks for writing.