Researching genealogy of African-American families can be tricky once you trace the line to enslaved ancestors, but a new database of records may help the process along.
In June, Ancestry.com released a database of 38,000 newspaper articles containing the names, ages, descriptions and locations of more than 183,000 enslaved people in America. This adds to the Ancestry database of 18 million records related to formerly enslaved or newly emancipated individuals from the census or Freedmen's Bureau. The Freedmen's Bureau operated from 1865 to about 1872. It supervised abandoned and confiscated property after the Civil War and provided help for formerly enslaved people to become self-sufficient.
Online genealogy sites have vastly improved public access to genealogical information from census, marriage, and legal sources. However, African-American families were not systematically included in these sources until 1870. So newspaper articles and advertisements can offer another source of information — though it can often be an emotional slog, since articles might well detail attempts to capture runaway slaves.
