Ancestry.com is using artificial intelligence (AI) to help Black Americans trace their family trees. The genealogy company has released a new collection of searchable newspaper articles containing information about formerly enslaved people in the U.S. The collection includes tens of thousands of newspaper records from the 1800s.
This free-access database aims to assist Black Americans in uncovering their familial histories. Utilizing AI, the tool scours newspaper records to identify the names of enslaved individuals. The collection comprises approximately 38,000 newspaper articles from 1788 to 1867, detailing information about more than 183,000 formerly enslaved people, including their names, ages, physical descriptions and locations.
“Many of these original newspaper articles contain never-before-seen information about enslaved individuals and fill gaps in historical records where courthouse and community documents have been lost or destroyed.”
Users will be able to visit the new landing page, which will be “dedicated to enslavement records and either search by name or explore a state with the most records. AI will comb through the once-hard-to-search records of newspapers for names of enslaved people, connecting names in Ancestry’s other databases of probate documents to piece together puzzles,” Axios reports.
Given the sensitive nature of this information, professional genealogist and Ancestry’s Senior Story Producer Nicka Sewell-Smith relayed that, “We’re telling people upfront, listen, you’re gonna you might see some stuff, some terms, some things that are going to jolt you.”
The largest records are from the states of Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia. Remarkably some of these records will even “show how Harriet Tubman helped some enslaved people escape north or offer clues that some may have tried to make a journey south to the Underground Railroad to Mexico.”
This new initiative will complement the Ancestry’s already available database consisting of “more than 18 million records…that document the lives of formerly enslaved or newly emancipated individuals. This includes Freedmen’s Bureau and Freedman’s Bank records, select U.S. Federal Census records, and other documents.”
Family history research can be challenging for Black Americans due to the long history of slavery in the United States and the lack of documentation about those who were enslaved,” stated Sewell-Smith.
“Because African-American slaves were considered property, often a bill of sale – bearing just the age and gender of the person sold – is the only record for an individual living in a pre-Civil War slave-holding state,” PBS notes.
“Exploring the articles in the context of their original publication can help us understand more about how slavery shaped everyday life in the United States and can help descendants of previously enslaved people unearth key discoveries about their family history,” Sewell-Smith added.
Clinical psychologist Donald Grant is executive director of Mindful Training Solutions, a Los Angeles based consulting behavioral health and wellness spoke to the importance of Black people tracing their familial history. “[B]ecause those things were deliberately severed, a lot of Black people are getting catharsis by identifying these connections that were taken from them.”
“These search options are providing people with opportunities to get tangible examples of their historical resilience,” Grant continued. “White people have stories about their heritage in newspapers and in textbooks that support white superiority and ideology. Black people have to find information to build that history, that pride.”
