For generations, children would play kickball, hide-and-seek and jump rope on a stretch of concrete at Weccacoe Playground, unaware the remains of 5,000 Black...
Read moreHow To “Find Your Roots” Like Henry Louis Gates Jr.
How do you find the right direction in your life and understand who you truly are? On PBS’s Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates Jr. allows celebrities like Scarlett...
Read moreMy Job at the Library: Researching African-American Genealogy
Ahmed Johnson is a local history and genealogy reference librarian in the Library’s Main Reading Room and a specialist in African-American history. A...
Read morePic of the Week: Mandela Grandson Shares Lessons He Learned from His Grandfather
Ndaba Mandela, the grandson of South African leader and humanitarian Nelson Mandela, spoke in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress on June 27 with...
Read moreInquiring Minds: Uncovering the Many Meanings of Slave Narratives
Carley Reinhard first encountered stories of slave capture in early 2017 in Professor Stephanie Shaw’s African-American history course at Ohio State University...
Read moreAn English City Grapples With The Slave-Trading Past Of Its Most Celebrated Figure
A statue of a merchant from the 17th century towers over the main square in Bristol, in southwest England. It’s a tribute to Edward Colston, described on a...
Read moreNigerian man connects with African American and Caribbean cousins through AncestryDNA
As a young boy of 6 or 7, Ade and his older brother normally visited with their grandmother Alice after school until their parents returned from work. On one...
Read moreHow the African-American Syphax Family Traces Its Lineage to Martha Washington
When Stephen Hammond was growing up, he scoffed when relatives told him he was related to the family of the nation’s first president, George Washington. It turns out...
Read moreTracing Your Roots: My Adopted Black Daughter Wants to Know Her Origins
I have worked very hard to trace back the ancestry of my adopted daughter Rasa Braswell, who is African American. (I am Caucasian.) However, I hit a snag once I got...
Read moreWhy DNA Ancestry Tests Are Struggling to Avoid White Bias
DNA ancestry tests, which help people find long-lost relatives and build family trees, have risen dramatically in popularity within the last several years. With...
Read moreThe Strange Evolution of Henry Louis Gates’s Estimate of Alex Haley and “Roots”
In 1998, Dr. Henry Louis (Skip) Gates, Jr., a University Professor and Director of Harvard’s Center for African and African American Research, explained in the...
Read moreDNA Testing Forced Me To Rethink My Entire Racial Identity
DNA testing sites make discovering your family history seem like one big genealogical adventure. But what about those ancestry stories that don’t have a happily ever...
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