r/BlackGenealogy

So lately I’ve seen a lot of issues and conflict where some of the black diaspora are fighting against the term “FBA/ADOS” because they feel like it’s separating the identity of the black communities/diaspora groups of those in America.

I feel like the term “black American/african american” use to be terms to specifically describe the descendants of those with ancestors from the slave trade or chattel slavery in the United States. Over time, though, “Black American” and even “African American” became broader umbrella terms that now include all recent immigrants of the black diaspora from places like Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, Haiti, and beyond. There’s nothing wrong with that but it does blur historical specificity.

Why is it controversial when descendants of U.S. ethnic lineage tied to U.S. slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, and the civil rights movement want to have their own distinctions to preserve their own identity, culture and history?

TL,DR: Looking for books on American Black woman sexual autonomy from slavery-Jim Crow due to finding repeated instances of NPEs on my dad's side of the family.

Initially I was so stuck in my tree work for my dad's family because his father's family was from Mississippi and his mom's family were from Arkansas, a couple places notorious for ngaf about records generally but especially if they involved Black people. I pulled in my eldest uncle for help, and he was able to fill in some gaps - he has very intimate knowledge of his maternal line, not so much his paternal, but what he has given me so far has really opened up this part of my family.

He was very honest about our family being blended - his parents were married multiple times and had kids with other partners before they married and had their final sets of kids, but my grandfather has kids outside his first couple marriages as well. My uncle's maternal great grandmother had a ton of relationships and had a ton of kids as a result - my great grandmother is her only child with one man she slept with, who she'd initially named a different man before coming clean, for instance - and further work uncovered the fact that my paternal grandmother is not the daughter of the man we were told. My uncle told me this with no shame and I hold no shame over it either. These are things that happened.

I finally broke down and started using the LEEDs method and I think I found my uncle's paternal great-grandmother's family based on relatively high shared cMs and time and place on census records. However, the man who I see on documents as having been her father may not be her father, for her to fit into this family. The majority of her documents that I've found (about a dozen) has her surname as her alleged real father's, her stepfather's, and my great grandfather's, the name on her death documents. There is ONE document, a SSDI for one of her deceased daughters, that has her last name as the same as the family I found. My working hypothesis is that her mother named a different man on documents than who was her real father, but w/o other documents to make that connection, I can't say for sure, and I'm baffled as to why it would show up so late w/o any other records explaining it.

All this got me to thinking about Harriet Jacobs and the little bit of the work I've read by Dr. Davis on Black American women's sexual autonomy, slavery-Jim Crow. I think about how all three of these NPE situations have/may result in a different father than named, and if that happened because of their own personal shame of being seen as "loose" from voluntary sexual encounters or if any combination of these encounters were involuntary but not addressed for whatever number of reasons they validly held for those times.

Does anyone have any further book recommendations on American Black woman sexual autonomy during this time period? I think it'd be very informative not just for my own edification, but also be helpful in my tree work. I appreciate any input, thanks!

What’s up y'all. Long-time no speak!

For the past few years, I've been doing genealogy research across various regions of the US, including the Upper & Deep South. Anyone who's done this knows the wall. 1870 hits and the paper trail just... stops. No last names before that, and if your ancestors were enslaved, the only records that exist are usually the ones written by the people who enslaved them. Estate inventories, slave schedules, bills of sale. It's a weird, uncomfortable kind of research where the "proof" of your family's existence is buried in someone else's property records.

I got frustrated enough with how the big platforms handle this (or don't) that I ended up building my own thing over the past several months. It's called ANCHOR Genealogy. Nothing fancy, it's a self-hosted family tree portal, but built specifically around the problems I kept running into:
A way to actually distinguish how someone shows up in an enslaver's records (are they clearly the same person, or just a probable match?) instead of just slapping a vague "hint" on it
Treating "no record found" as something worth documenting, not just a dead end
Basic stuff too, sources, DNA match notes, life events, the usual tree-building tools
It's still rough in places. I'm one person building this, not a company, so there are bugs and things I haven't thought of yet.

I'd love it if a handful of people (maybe 8-10) could just click around, add some fake info, break stuff, and tell me honestly what's confusing or missing. No cost, no catch, I'll set you up with your own test tree seeded with a fictional starter family so there's something to actually explore.

If you're interested, drop a comment or shoot me a DM. Genuinely just trying to make something useful for people who've hit the same wall I have.

Hi everyone,

I'm Afro-Cuban and African American, and over the past year I've been helping my mom as she researches African and Latin diasporas. We have discussed that a lot of genealogy software seems designed around fairly straightforward family trees, but Black genealogy often comes with unique challenges because of slavery, migration, name changes, missing records, and oral history.

I'm curious:

• What information do you wish genealogy software made easier to record or visualize?
• Is there part of your research that lives in other mediums because your genealogy software doesn't handle it well?
• Is there something you wish Ancestry, FamilySearch, or another genealogy platform could do that none of them currently does?

I'm interested in hearing about workflows and frustrations, even small annoyances are welcome.

Thank you in advance, I'd love to learn from people with more experience than I have.

Please forgive me if this is the wrong place or has been asked, I'm white and don't know what I'm doing. While researching my cajun family I've started copying slave baptisms and other records from the library, and am wondering where (if anywhere) I can upload them? They're Catholic church records so they have some good info, I just don't know if there's like a repository or special section of ancestory .com or different website for records like these.

https://preview.redd.it/tga71j0df1ih1.png?width=492&format=png&auto=webp&s=5db1cc06296f89d5a4ec4c73c88f9f2649638214