For many Black Americans, tracing one’s family roots back more than 150 years has been nearly impossible due to a lack of adequate data and documentation from the slavery period. Now, a team of researchers, genealogists and scholars are working together to recover and restore this lost history, which is American history.
ABC News is the exclusive media partner of the historic 10 Million Names Project, an ambitious moon shot initiative that aims to recover the names of the 10 million people of African descent who were enslaved before 1865 in the present-day United States.
“Those 10 million people have approximately 44 million descendants living today and all of them, all of us, face greater challenges, significantly greater difficulty than do most white Americans when it comes to tracing our ancestors,” Dr. Kendra Field, chief historian of the 10 Million Names Project, told ABC News.
“The legacy of slavery has blocked access to much of Black American family history and genealogy,” Field said.
Freed slaves on the Smith Plantation, circa 1862.
“It was often obscured or erased or difficult to find,” Field explained. “Descendants from say, Mayflower pilgrims, had access to a whole different set of tools and documents.”
The goal of the project is to identify the names of every individual who lived through this difficult history, providing dignity to the ancestors and the power of knowledge to descendants. The project also invites anyone to share their own family history and information, with the ultimate goal of constructing a free, public, searchable database. Click here to learn more.
Research into the ancestry of ABC News’ Michael Strahan was first featured on PBS’ “Finding Your Roots.” The research revealed Strahan descends from James and Winnie Shankle, formerly enslaved people, who once freed, established an impressive “freedom colony” called Shankleville in East Texas. It was an entirely self-sufficient, independent Black community that thrived. Strahan traveled to Shankleville this August and was able to connect with other proud descendants from this historic colony.
Descendants gather circa 1955 for the annual “Homecoming”- an event established in 1941 to reconnect and to raise funds for the upkeep of the Jim Shankle and Shankleville Community Cemeteries, in Shankleville, Texas.
If you would like to learn more about Black history pre- and post-emancipation, freedom colonies and free peoples, you can find additional resources below.Field and Shankleville descendant Lareatha Clay have curated a list of resources to learn more about this important period of American history.
Read on for their book recommendations, in their own words.
Join American Ancestors on Aug. 24 for a free online lecture, “Introducing the 10 Million Names Project.” Click here to register.
Slaves of Thomas F. Drayton of Magnolia Plantation, Hilton Head, S.C., 1862. Drayton, a Southern plantation owner, served as a Brigadier General in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.
Book recommendations from Kendra Field, Ph.D.
“Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery” by Heather Andrea Williams
After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant “information wanted” advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations.
“All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake” by Tiya Miles
In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. “All That She Carried” is a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds.
“Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century” by Tera W. Hunter
Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. “Bound in Wedlock” is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the 19th century. Drawing from plantation records, legal documents and personal family papers, it reveals the many creative ways enslaved couples found to upend white Christian ideas of marriage.
“The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom” by Thulani Davis
In “The Emancipation Circuit,” Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the 4 million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom — circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists — that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States.
Additional recommendations
“Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves” by Ira Berlin
Most Americans, Black and white, have a singular vision of slavery, one fixed in the mid-19th century when most American slaves grew cotton, resided in the deep South, and subscribed to Christianity. Slavery was thus made and remade by successive generations of Africans and African Americans who lived through settlement and adaptation, plantation life, economic transformations, revolution, forced migration, war and ultimately emancipation. Berlin offers a dynamic vision, a major reinterpretation in which slaves and their owners continually renegotiated the terms of captivity.
“Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War” by Kendra Taira Field
Following the lead of her own ancestors, Field’s family history chronicles the westward migration of freedom’s first generation in the 50 years after emancipation. Drawing on decades of archival research and family lore within and beyond the United States, Field traces their journey out of the South to Indian Territory, where they participated in the development of Black and Black Indian towns and settlements. Interweaving Black, white, and Indian histories, Field’s beautifully wrought narrative explores how ideas about race and color powerfully shaped the pursuit of freedom.
“The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family” by Kerri K. Greenidge
An eye-opening counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family. Sarah and Angelina Grimke — the Grimke sisters — are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today.
“A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration” by Steven Hahn
This is the epic story of how African Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people — an embryonic Black nation. Author Steven Hahn illustrates how rural African Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation and nation building. “A Nation Under Our Feet” emphasizes the importance of kinship, labor, and communication networks, and compels us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.
A group of fugitive slaves who were emancipated upon reaching the North, sitting outside a house, possibly in Freedman’s Village in Arlington, Va., in the mid 1860s. Up to 1100 former slaves at a time were housed in the government-established Freedman’s Village in the thirty years in which it served as a temporary shelter for runaway and liberated slaves.
Book Recommendations from Shankleville descendant Lareatha Clay
“Never Sell the Land” by Andrea Roberts, Ph.D.
Roberts’ book, publishing in 2024, will be the first in-depth study of Texas freedom colonies, and the first book that I know of by a descendant of a colony. She looks at the founding of freedom colonies not only through a historical preservation lens, but through a planning lens. Roberts sets up Shankleville and the work we’ve done as a model of what can be done in other communities, and the prominent role that everyday people play in building this state/country.
“Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow” by Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad
This book is the first to give a name to the hundreds of independent, unincorporated Black communities we now know as “freedom colonies.” It also served as the starting point for Andrea Roberts’ research into these communities, where her focus is from a planning perspective in addition to a traditional historical lens.
“From Teacakes to Tamales: Third-Generation Texas Recipes” by Nola McKey
My primary reason for listing this book is because of the two recipes [my first cousin Harold Odom Jr. and I] submitted from my grandmother, Addie Lewis Odom. The recipe for and stories about Purple Hull Peas are on pages 87-90. The recipe and background for her teacakes are on pages 158-160. The Jim and Winnie story about the founding of the colony is recounted on page 161.
Descendants gather circa 1955 for the annual “Homecoming”- an event established in 1941 to reconnect and to raise funds for the upkeep of the Jim Shankle and Shankleville Community Cemeteries, in Shankleville, Texas.
Join American Ancestors on Aug. 24 for a free online lecture, “Introducing the 10 Million Names Project.” Click here to register.
