Ancestry Magazine

It’s frustrating when it happens—hitting a blip in our family history. When something, someone, somewhere just stops. Disappears. Almost like they never existed at all.We get over it, tracing another family line, digging a little deeper for alternative sources of information. But when you’re searching for African American ancestors, those little blips aren’t always so maneuverable. And, when you can’t find the right approach, they may even seem like giant chasms.

Searching for Answers
Few of us have simple ancestries to trace. Ancestors may get a little lost in the translation of immigration—names get misspelled, languages misinterpreted, facts skewed or recorded creatively. Stories we heard in childhood make the family facts that we find as we grow older hard to confirm. Marriage, death, childbirth, divorce, cross-country migrations, and moves: any of these factors can play tricks on an ancestors’ paper trail.It’s worse for the African American family historian, particularly when descended from slaves.Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., knows this fact all too well. As a recognized lecturer and author, and formerly one of Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans,” even Gates&rsq uo;s position in the limelight didn’t help his family history research. “I knew everything back to Jane Gates—back to 1819,” says Gates. But that was all. Gates knew that his slave ancestors were freed early in the nineteenth century—1823 to be exact—and his family still held the documents to prove this. But before 1819, Gates’s trail went cold—a common trait in searching for African American ancestry.

Immovable Barriers
Genealogist Johni Cerny started researching African American ancestry two decades ago when music producer Quincy Jones was looking for help with his ancestry. And with more than twenty years of experience researching the topic under her belt today, Cerny has to agree with Gates—the lack of a last name is one of the biggest issues. But it’s not the only one.“The biggest challenge is that African Americans prior to the emancipation were personal property. Their names simply don’t appear in public records like white Americans do,” says Cerny. “In some cases, the trail ends at emancipation. You can’t really place people with an owner. When you get to the eight and sixteen ancestor area [great- and great-great grandparents], those are the slave generations”—where the trail abruptly stops.Even if an African American family historian happens to have an ancestor who was freed early (like Gates’s ancestors) or who remained for generations with a single owner who kept birth and death records, tracing names beyond American soil is impossible, frustrating, and disturbing. “Slaves were snagged in the jungle,” says Cerny. “People didn’t speak the tribal languages. Their language was taken from them, their culture was taken. There’s no paper trail. That’s the reality.”And that seemingly-paperless reality is exactly what Gates wanted to maneuver around.

Progressive Movement
“We think of history under the terms of the great man and great woman of history or the mass movement of history which turns on nameless social forces,” says Gates. “But [family history] is history that starts in your own living room.”Gates wanted to find a way to reach beyond America’s shores, to give people, African Americans in particular, some sense of personal history. He enlisted the most powerful medium available—television—and a collection of African American stars, each of whom held an interest in finding his or her ancestors, but who knew little about his or her own personal history.It’s been thirty years since Alex Haley’s book, Roots, and subsequent mini-series resulted in an eruption of interest in genealogy. And, in the time since, technology has changed the way family historians approach their research. Record collections have been digitized, research is stored on computers, new ways of searching, discovering, and connecting to far-removed family members are being developed all the time. But searching for an African ancestor—or any other ancestor—can still mean extracting information from oral hist ories, traditions, legends, and hunches. And even with all of the modern alternatives, researchers are still chasing sometimes-fleeting and frustrating trails of actual paper.These facts encouraged Gates to enlist every resource available, including Cerny—“She knows more about dead black people than Saint Peter,” laughs Gates—in his quest to find the ancestors of Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Tucker, Quincy Jones, Dr. Mae Jemison, Dr. Ben Carson, Bishop T.D. Jakes, and Dr. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, as well as his own.

How It Happens
“It’s not as difficult [to trace African American ancestries in the United States] today as it used to be twenty or twenty-five years ago when I first started with Quincy Jones and his ancestry,” says Cerny, who handled the genealogical research end of Gates’s resulting production, African American Lives, airing on PBS in February. “And doing as many lines as we did for these eight people, trying to find the slave ancestor, we really were able to develop a basic technique that should work for just about everybody.”Cerny’s formula went like this: “Once you trace lines back to the 1870 census, you’ll find that some of the time [the slaves] took the name of the slave owner. In this case we were lucky—a lot of people did,” says Cerny. “You can look at the slave owners in 1850 and 1860 slave schedules and get an idea of the number of slaves owned and the ir ages.” Cerny notes that this can oftentimes be unreliable—“but it’s a start,” she says.The next step is to go to property records, land records, and deeds. For example, says Cerny, “In one of these families, Mae Jemison’s, Robert Jemison was a very large plantation owner and owned a large number of slaves and [bore] a number of children. In deeds, we were able to find a list of the slaves deeded to each child. We were even able to find the name of [Mae’s] ancestor, Adam Jemison, in the documents.”Cerny also searched estate records where, she says, prior to the 1850 to 1870 period, there is usually an estate inventory. “In a lot of the documents they grouped [slaves] by family—very good circumstantial evidence,” says Cerny.

Alternative Routes
Finding a link back to Africa may mean forgoing the quest to trace one person or one family and switching to a broader research concept, like DNA testing, to find a link to a specific group of people. That’s what spurred Gates to include DNA as part of the African American Lives series.“My goal is that children, especially inn er-city black school children, will realize the wonders of archival research and their own family histories and where they came from in Africa—something they can actually touch and something that affects them directly,” says Gates. Indirectly, he also wants to be able tell this same audience something about themselves and their genes and their collective experiences. He wants them to see the origins of some of their role models, and understand that their family histories don’t end when the first of their ancestors was enslaved. He wants them to know that through technological advances, they may, for the first time, be able to discover the specific African culture from which their families stem.According to Dr. Rick Kittles, whose company African Ancestry Inc., performed the DNA testing for the series, DNA testing is rapidly gaining popularity in the field of genealogy. But, even so, it still has its limitations.“It’s definitely not a replacement” for record research, says Kittles. “In fact, it only supplements traditional approaches. I’m very frank about that when I talk to people. I say this is not going to replace and it’s not the bottom line either. It may only provide general information.”

What They Learned
“It was deeply moving,” says Gates. “For one participant, it moved him to tears to see a group of people with whom he shares genes.”Gates isn’t merely referring to the DNA findings—he’s referring to the whole package that put names, faces, stories, places, and histories to the pasts of a group of very powerful and influential Americans of the present.Yet Gates admits that even he was surprised by the impact that the show had, particularly in respect to the genealogical findings—an aspect of the show he initially anticipated would take a backseat to DNA testing. But with stories of murder, homesteading, free African American ancestors dating back to America’s fight for independence, these ancestral stories were destined to rise to the top.“When I conceived of the series, I thought the more interesting half would be the revelation of the mitochondrial DNA,” says Gates. “But the guests were more fascinated with their genealogy—the real stories we were creating about their ancestors. We’re telling them stories about the people from whom they descend.”